Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
-Benjamin Franklin

Europe Rejects U.S. Deal on Bank Data

By JAMES KANTER

BRUSSELS — The European Parliament on Thursday broadly rejected an agreement with the United States on sharing information about bank transfers that was aimed at tracking people suspected of being terrorists.

The European Parliament rejected the agreement by a vote of 378 to 196, with 31 abstentions.

The vote underlined differences between the United States and the European Union over how to balance personal privacy guarantees with concerns on national and international security.

The agreement, rejected 378 to 196 with 31 abstentions, would have freed the United States from having to seek bank data on a country-by-country basis. It went into effect provisionally at the start of February and was to last nine months while a more permanent arrangement was sought.

But many members of the Parliament complained that the agreement had failed to guarantee the privacy rights of European citizens.

Members also were angered when ministers from the body’s 27 national governments agreed on the provisional deal a day before activation of a treaty that gave members of the European Parliament greater say over data-protection issues.

Underscoring the importance of the agreement to the United States, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner had promised to cooperate with the Parliament in negotiating the long-term accord.

Question about sharing bank data emerged in 2006, after The New York Times reported that a Belgian cooperative responsible for routing about $6 trillion daily among banks, brokerage houses, stock exchanges and other institutions had provided information about transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

The cooperative, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift, is based near Brussels.

American and European leaders had warned that rejecting the accord would leave a security gap. Some legislators said use of the Swift data had already made it possible to thwart attacks.

A statement issued on Thursday by the United States Mission to the European Union said the decision to reject the agreement “disrupts an important counterterrorism program which has resulted in more than 1,500 reports and numerous leads to European governmental authorities and has contributed significantly to collaborative counterterrorism efforts between the United States and Europe.” The statement said the “outcome is a setback for U.S.-E.U. counterterror cooperation.”

But a large number of European Parliament members complained that the agreement would have granted the United States far too much power to intrude into the lives of European citizens.

A German member, Martin Schulz, said this week that he was concerned the data on European citizens could be kept on file for nearly a century.

The accord was signed in November but needed parliamentary consent to be legally binding.

Cecilia Malmstrom, the European Union’s commissioner for home affairs, had argued in favor of the agreement, and on Thursday pleaded in favor of postponing a decision.

The United States could still rely on an agreement on mutual legal assistance to seek the data. But that could make the process of gathering the information more cumbersome.

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