Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2014-03-11-Speech-2-747-000"
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"en.20140311.72.2-747-000"2
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"Madam President, when we began this inquiry six months ago into the revelations of Edward Snowden and the campaign of the Guardian newspaper, it was an extremely difficult and sensitive and ambitious inquiry to conduct. The precedent we had was the Echelon inquiry and the CIA renditions inquiry, and we had a huge task on our hands. But what was important about the inquiry was that it was different, and the narrative was different from any inquiry undertaken by any Member State because of what we have just heard.
To protect the rule of law and fundamental rights of EU citizens, including threats to freedom of the press, the right of the public to receive impartial information and professional confidentiality, including lawyer/client relations as well as ensuring enhanced protection for whistle-blowers.
The Snowden revelations gave us a chance to react to those revelations. Tomorrow, in a unified way, I hope we will turn those reactions into the first stage of a digital bill of rights. Let us have a unified vote tomorrow to ensure we have turned this into something positive and lasting into the next mandate of this Parliament, a data protection bill of rights that we can all be proud of.
And what we have just heard is that the European Union is unique, and this House is unique in that we were a mature Parliament which was already legislating on the data protection regulation and the directive. So we were a parliament that was already dealing with one set of privacy rights internationally and with the digital economy. So while the Snowden revelations were raging, we in this House were already equipped to deal with privacy rights and the whole area of data protection law.
What my colleagues and I have tried to do in this inquiry, given that we only had six months and that we had an extraordinary set of sensitive issues to deal with, was to take Edward Snowden’s revelations (and he has given evidence in the last few days) – all of the sensitivities around the spying allegations and espionage, and the many stories in the press – and to ensure that from that situation we worked together across the political groups to have the most in-depth inquiry, I believe, anywhere in the world.
In six months we ensured that we went to Washington and that we had accountability here amongst whistleblowers, Parliamentary scrutiny bodies, intelligence bodies, and a whole range of players and actors here in Brussels and Strasbourg.
We ensured at the end of that process that, together with my shadows – and I want to mention all of them: Mr[nbsp ]Voss, Ms in[nbsp ]‘t Veld, Ms[nbsp ]Ernst, Mr[nbsp ]Albrecht, Mr[nbsp ]Kirkhope – and our colleagues from the Committee on Foreign Affairs, all of us who worked tirelessly over those many hours to ensure that, at the end of that process of the Snowden revelations and many hours of interviews, we looked into what intelligence services were doing. But we also understood that we had to come up with a digital bill of rights.
It is a testament to this report that in many parts of the Member States across the European Union, in many political parties and in many Member States, the issue of the digital bill of rights and a digital habeus corpus is being spoken of. They are in fact referring to our report, and in doing so they are referring to what we learned in the Echelon report, which was that we can carry out an in-depth inquiry in this House but that we must make something of it and we must make something lasting of it.
There is so much expertise and commitment here in the European Union on issues of privacy and fundamental rights – but how do we make it last? So what we have created from the Edward Snowden allegations, the witnesses and the interviews – Jim Sensenbrenner the Congressman, who created the Patriot Act but told us now that we need to do something about what the NSA is saying, and President Obama, who told us that on the one hand he wants to protect US citizens but foreshadowed what is happening to foreign persons – in all of that we had to create this digital bill of rights or digital habeus corpus.
So we created a number of actions. First of all, to conclude the EU-US Umbrella Agreement guaranteeing the fundamental rights of citizens to privacy and data protection; to suspend Safe Harbour until a full review has been conducted and current loopholes are remedied; to ensure that we suspend TFTP until the Umbrella Agreement and negotiations have been concluded and a thorough investigation has been concluded on the basis of an EU analysis; to evaluate any agreement mechanism or exchange with third countries involving personal data in order to ensure that the right to privacy and to the protection of personal data is not violated due to surveillance activities and to take the necessary follow-up actions.
I will finish in just 30 seconds."@en1
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