Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-11-10-Speech-3-031"
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"en.20101110.14.3-031"2
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"Mr President, Mrs Reding, Commissioner, honourable Members, as you know, the debate on the cooperation between the United States and the EU has been ongoing for some time now and, notably, we received a Commission proposal on 28 May 2010 requesting approval for the opening of negotiations on an agreement between the European Union and the United States on the protection of personal data, a subject that has been discussed several times before, including in this House.
By way of conclusion, therefore, Mr President, I should like to emphasise that the Presidency is striving to have the negotiating mandate for this comprehensive agreement dealt with at the same time as the three mandates for the PNR agreements with Australia, Canada and the United States, and that we should very much like to discuss the matter at the Council meeting on 2 and 3 December next. Thank you for your attention.
At the same time, the Commission has been acting on the work of the EU-US High-Level Contact Group on Data Protection and Data Sharing, which drew up a report in 2008 that was also made available to the European Parliament. The data protection discussed in that report is, of course, a fundamental subject as far as Europe is concerned. It is a fundamental freedom which is enshrined in Article 16 of the treaty, and to which the Presidency attaches particular importance. Therefore, the Presidency supports all initiatives aimed at improving data protection in transatlantic relations and at ensuring an adequate level of such protection.
This agreement should take account of the data protection principles laid down in various documents: the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, the 1995 Data Protection Directive and the 2008 Framework Decision. I said we need to achieve an adequate level of data protection, and this must be interpreted as not always being an equivalent or identical one.
There must be a high, adequate level of protection of the rights of the individual, but the way in which these rights are guaranteed may differ from country to country. Each system has specific characteristics, including with regard to data protection, and this must not pose a fundamental problem. What is important, however, is that we can guarantee that the civil rights contained in the future agreement are enforceable, and are enforceable in favour of everyone concerned.
How will the United States and the European Union guarantee that these rights are enforceable in specific terms? Each party will have to decide this for itself. We take the view that, in the same way that a European directive can be transposed differently by different Member States, an international agreement can also be transposed in different ways. Yet what matters to everyone at all events is the end result: having rights that are enforceable in favour of the parties concerned on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Since the Council shares Parliament’s concern on this point, it will make a request, in its decision authorising the opening of negotiations, for the Commission to submit a report to the Council in the course of those negotiations, focusing, in particular, on the specific question as to how the specific enforceability of rights laid down in the agreement will be guaranteed.
Sectoral agreements have already been concluded in the past, with specific data protection arrangements that were different for each sector; and, at present, the differing provisions of these agreements form a kind of inextricable tangle that really hampers the task of the police officers responsible for applying the data protection provisions. The negotiations on these specific agreements are under great time pressure. This was true of the Passenger Name Record (PNR) agreements and of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP); you are familiar with the discussions. Thus, when it comes to the forthcoming comprehensive data protection agreement in which the data protection principles are to be enshrined, we must try to avoid the need to repeatedly negotiate new sectoral agreements.
On the other hand, we must also be realistic and understand that a single comprehensive agreement with the United States in the field of data protection will never be able to eliminate all possible future problems. We should bear in mind, therefore, that it is still possible to conclude additional specific agreements afterwards.
Thus, there will have to be what is known as an ‘umbrella agreement’, which lays down fundamental rights but does not, in itself, form a basis for data transfer. Data must be transferred on the basis of other existing or future specific agreements."@en1
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