Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2015-10-28-Speech-3-1403-000"
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"en.20151028.35.3-1403-000"2
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"Madam President, again I am not in my usual seat for the reasons I mentioned earlier. The oral question which I present today to the Commissioner – he is not yet in his place – but I am going to present the questions first and then explain this very sensitive and important topic to colleagues. The questions that we are going to present in the oral question are first of all: what is the Council’s and Commissionʼs general political assessment as to any electronic mass surveillance EU citizens are subject to? Do the Council and Commission consider EU citizens to be sufficiently protected against unnecessary electronic mass surveillance? What measures have the Council and Commission undertaken since the adoption of the resolution of 12 March 2014 in order to protect fundamental rights in a digital age, and what further measures do the Council and Commission plan to take? I am very conscious – Commissioner, I am sorry that you have just taken your seat, but I am sure you will catch up – that these are very broad questions, but what I want to say to colleagues present in the Chamber is that one of the most surprising things about the inquiry of March 2014 into mass surveillance was the outcome of the plenary vote – an extraordinary 544 Members in this plenary across the political spectrum voted for a very sensitive and far-reaching report. They did it because they were acting in a very mature way; they understood that what was happening was that we were not just dealing with one of the most important issues that all individual sovereign countries have to deal with – that is: the protection of their citizens, and therefore intelligence agencies have to do their work – but we were dealing with one of the biggest growth areas in the confidence, in the privacy of individual citizens, you and I. And we have seen in recent days massive data breaches of major telecom companies like Talk Talk. We have seen the judgment on Safe Harbour; and it is very prescient that such an important vote took place in March 2014 because human rights in a digital age were taken very seriously by this Parliament for a reason, and that is that privacy is not a soft option; privacy is fundamental to consumer confidence; privacy is fundamental to human rights in the digital age.
So the resolution that we present to Members and to the Commission and Council is about what follow-up we have. In this follow-up resolution, if I take one example, the Safe Harbour judgment of the European Court of Justice, we have a situation where the European Parliament warned incessantly that Safe Harbour was not safe, that the transfers of mass data from the European Union which had higher standards of data protection compared to the United States, which had lower standards, would end up with this kind of situation and a negative situation. We warned of mass surveillance, not for security and purposes of protecting individuals, but simply mass surveillance, very expensive mass surveillance, which was uncontrolled, which has negative implications. Since then the Council of Europe and individual Member States, individual parliaments of Member States, have gone into great detail with their inquiries. And I am very proud that this Parliament went into great detail in the post-Snowden era on digital rights and human rights in the digital era, because we were able to say, on the one hand, that this is vital to tackle terrorism, it is vital to tackle security threats, but that it is incredibly important to understand that we will not do this if there is no credibility in the way that mass surveillance is carried out.
I think we set some good standards in March 2014. What we are now trying to do in this oral question is to see, with the four questions I have put to both Council and Commission, what follow up we actually have on all of these key points. For the European Union, with the trilogues currently running on data regulation, and on the question of the Data Directive, but also on the agreements on PNR, on SWIFT and so on, it is very important that we understand that the European Union is itself invested in transferring data as a European Union to other places; and for that reason we have the competence and we have the need to understand these issues and get these issues fixed. But most importantly it is about the privacy of the citizen, paramountly, and we need to represent the citizen, ensure they are confident in their privacy and ensure they have the confidence to go forward, and they feel they are represented. Look around you and see whether that is necessary and then look at this resolution and see whether it is worthy of support. So I hand over to the Commission and Council to tell us what they are now doing on this resolution and the questions I have put."@en1
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