Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-03-12-Speech-3-188"
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"en.20030312.5.3-188"2
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". – Mr President, I shall do my best to answer the most important questions and remarks addressed to me. It is difficult to be brief as this is a complicated and important subject.
Furthermore, the question has been raised in particular by Mrs Buitenweg and also by other Members of Parliament about meals taken on aircraft. It is important to realise that the US screening process does not use data such as meal orders, but those data are in passenger name records and they are downloaded with the rest. That is bad practice in terms of data protection. The fact is that the United States neither requires airlines to change their data collection practices nor asks them to separate relevant data from irrelevant data, which makes the exercise less costly for the airlines.
Mr Santini and Mr Jarzembowski referred to this aspect of the case. Even our Directive says that certain efforts are not mandatory where they are disproportionate to the results they achieve for data protection. We shall certainly pursue our talks with the airlines with the view to their installing filters that separate US flights from the rest and possibly also filters that separate sensitive data from other data which the US side say they do not need or use.
These are some of the more substantial points which were raised by Members of Parliament. In addition to these points, with respect to a suggestion made by Mrs Paciotti, the possibility of using 25(6), i.e. a finding of adequacy, is of course available. If the Commission should come to the conclusion that there is adequacy in this area it will and it must inform Parliament and a proper discussion can then take place on the basis of this finding of the Commission.
A question has also been raised about discussions to be held at political level. I am sensitive to that suggestion and I shall certainly discuss it with Commissioner Patten – who begs to be excused for the reasons that he mentioned – and Commissioner de Palacio, since she, for obvious reasons, is very much involved.
On the other hand I would like to say that it is not always the political input that provides a solution. After all, the staff – certainly in the case of the services that work under my supervision – are extremely able people. There is no reason to suppose that they can achieve less than Commissioners at political level, but the possibility cannot be excluded and I am therefore sensitive to this suggestion.
Various Members of Parliament have spoken about the suspension of the American measures. I am sorry, but in view of what I said earlier and also what Mr Jarzembowski said, we cannot afford, especially in these days of political uncertainty and economic downturn, to stop air traffic to the United States or seriously put it in jeopardy. After all it concerns millions of passengers per year and we cannot afford to put that in jeopardy.
Mr Jarzembowski has said that we must have a practical solution, with a proper legal basis, in cooperation with the United States. I agree entirely with him and the Commission will make every effort to achieve that practical solution, firmly based on the law. I hope to be able to discuss further developments in this area with Parliament as appropriate.
So far we have achieved two things: first, we secured American agreement on the further steps to be taken to reach a mutually satisfactory solution that can provide legal certainty to all concerned. I should like to stress that this seems mutually satisfactory to the Commission, the European Parliament and the European side. I say this in particular to Mrs Buitenweg, who insisted that our norms should be the touchstone for the acceptability of any agreement that might be achieved in future. It must be a mutually satisfactory solution. The American side has accepted that.
Secondly, the American side has given a number of significant unilateral undertakings of immediate application. For example, they gave undertakings on what data they would not use and how they would handle the day-to-day 'do use'. In particular, data gathering would be limited to flights to, from or through the United States. Our discussions so far have yielded this result. We have not yet reached the end of the road – far from it. We have not yet achieved an agreement. The discussions with the United States will continue, I hope as quickly and as energetically as possible. It is premature to say that the Commission has failed and that it should have achieved more than it has. On behalf of Commissioner Patten and Commissioner de Palacio, who deals with transport, I must reject those criticisms. That is not to say that there is not more to do.
It has been pointed out that, although there is no agreement as yet, the effect is nonetheless that data is being accessed where it was not accessed before. That is true. It is clear that in the absence of discussions the airlines would have provided the data anyway. The airlines know that the US airlines and US-based reservations systems are already doing this.
That is a very important point which may have been overlooked in the heat of the debate. It is not simply a question of letting the data be transferred or preventing this, much of it is flowing anyway. Therefore it seems to me that the suggestion which has been made that we should take the airlines to the European Court of Justice is not a very productive suggestion. It is happening now. The airlines are, as Baroness Ludford said, between a rock and a hard place. They know that the American side is serious about imposing penalties, including some that could put their transatlantic traffic at risk. The counterbalancing threat – namely that the Commission would start infringement proceedings, legal action for breaches of the data protection rules – was a serious concern for the airlines. However, some of them have said that is not life-threatening, whereas the American threats are. I would beg Members to understand the very difficult position in which the airlines find themselves, which will have an effect on transatlantic traffic of 10 to 11 million passengers a year, as Commissioner Patten has explained.
A number of speakers have mentioned the supply of information to European Union citizens. Under data protection law, as I am sure Members know, the first duty to inform data subjects lies with data controllers. In this case that is the airlines and possibly travel agents. On Friday 14 March there will be a meeting to ensure that they understand their obligations to inform passengers and aircraft crews about what will happen to their data and why. A duty of information also lies with the American Government. Most of us would find it hard to argue that a country such as the United States does not have the right to determine the conditions under which it allows people to enter the country. They also have a duty to inform the public so that potential travellers can make an informed choice.
Baroness Ludford made a very pertinent point about the data systems that would be based in the European Union and the way in which the United States would access those data systems. It concerns the direct application of the Directive to US Customs that give the European Directive a clear extraterritorial effect.
The Commission is at present undertaking a thorough legal analysis of the various implications of that question, for example with regard to the scope of the Directive and to the exercise of state power by US Customs within the territory of Member States. The judgment is awaited from the European courts in a case that may throw some light on the Directive's precise scope but no date has yet been fixed by the courts.
In any event this question only arises when US Customs have direct access to the airlines' databases. It would not arise if the airlines were to send the data to US Customs and this method of transfer, that is the push method, is certainly much to be preferred if it can be organised from a technical point of view."@en1
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