Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-10-23-Speech-2-625-000"
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"en.20121023.48.2-625-000"2
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".
Mr President, honourable Members, I really appreciate your engagement on this because it is an extremely important subject. But we also need to realise that data retention is here to stay.
The Member States support this and will not accept any proposal to abolish it. The risk is that we will then have 27 different versions for data retention in the different Member States with no common standards in respect of privacy and purpose.
We did an evaluation in April 2011 which made use of evidence from the Member States – you may call it anecdotal – but we had evidence on how they used this. Since then we have received more evidence of how it is used. These are concrete examples of how data retention has been used in order to crack down on criminal and drug networks and to identify victims and persecutors in child abuse networks, etc. I would be happy to share them with the European Parliament. We have already done so and we are happy to do so again.
I understand the criticism here, and I share much of it, but we need to be honest: this is not the mass surveillance of 500 million citizens. This is data that has been kept for commercial purposes by companies. It can be accessed by police authorities under certain conditions on an individual basis. It is not mass surveillance; we need to be clear on this. These practices are subject to democratic and judicial controls in the Member States.
Having said this, there are problems with this directive which are clearly outlined in the evaluation from April last year. I have mentioned them and Members have referred to them in their speeches.
There is insufficient harmonisation and clarity on the scope, who has access, the definition of serious crime, data protection rules and the retention period. We will seek to amend this and to shorten the data retention period. The revised proposal will also include a full assessment of the directive’s impact on privacy and other fundamental rights.
Data protection is a very important issue – all the Members would agree on this. We in the European Union need to have a coherent view on this, and that is why we need to do this together with certain other things. We need to address the loophole that today exists in the ePrivacy Directive, and which some Members referred to.
We must also make sure that the General Data Protection Regulation – and I know that many Members here are involved in reforming it – is in line with what we are doing, otherwise we will have divergences in legislation.
All this needs to be looked at together, and that is why I cannot give you an exact timetable today on when we will do that. But the purpose is for us to have strong data protection rules, and I will be more than happy to continue working very closely with the European Parliament."@en1
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