Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-10-11-Speech-3-118"
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"en.20061011.15.3-118"2
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".
Mr President, Mr Vice-President of the Commission, Mrs in ’t Veld is right: the PNR agreement concluded last week is by no means cause for celebration. Although the fact that we once more have an agreement, as opposed to no agreement, avoids legal uncertainty, nothing has been achieved, in essence, in terms of content. On the contrary, the new agreement even falls short of the previous one.
This has been yet another instance of the EU kowtowing to Washington. How else can one interpret the fact that PNR data are to be transmitted directly to the US Department of Homeland Security? The real scandal is the fact that, in future, this all-powerful US authority will be able to routinely transmit data on European airline passengers to all the US authorities active in the field of combating terrorism – which includes the CIA, and we all know what that is capable of. I should just like to remind my fellow Members that this House set up a special committee because the CIA, in the process of ‘combating terrorism’, was taking it upon itself to kidnap and torture Europeans, among them the German citizen Khaled El Masri. In the light of this, are we to believe that this notorious secret service will not do as it pleases with airline passenger data on our citizens?
The new agreement, too – despite Parliament’s demands to the contrary – fails to afford EU citizens even the same means of legal protection as it does American airline passengers. EU citizens will not have equivalent means of legal redress to defend themselves against the processing of incorrect data or against the abuse of their data. Why was it not possible to make the regulations that apply to US citizens applicable to EU citizens, too – as is the case, for example, with the agreement between the EC and Canada? The PNR agreement does not afford sufficient protection of EC citizens’ right of self-determination over their personal data, and my group considers this unacceptable.
The only ray of hope may be the envisaged change of system from ‘pull’ to ‘push’, but even this is relative, as it is not the intention to introduce this change immediately, despite existing commitments on the part of the USA, but to first have a trial run. The push system is used in the case of Canada, however, and is perfectly feasible in technical terms. What, then, was stopping the EU from insisting that the USA immediately honour the commitment it made to us a long time ago?"@en1
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