Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-02-15-Speech-3-615-000"
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"en.20120215.28.3-615-000"2
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"Mr President, I agree entirely with the Members who have said that the high standards which we give to our citizens – rightly so – must also be transferred when there is an exchange of data with third countries. We in the Commission take this question very seriously, because the Commission believes and supports the principle that, in international public law, a legal act which is enacted by a third country cannot be directly and automatically applied in the territory of the EU unless – exceptionally – Union law or Member State law explicitly recognises the facts of such an act in their respective jurisdiction.
No legal acts of a third country as such can legally overrule the relevant EU legislation or Member State legislation, and this includes data protection rules. Any processing of personal data in the EU has to respect the applicable EU data protection law. If – and this was Ms in ’t Veld’s basic question – a US law enforcement authority requires information from companies operating in the European Union, whatever the nationality of those companies, they have to use existing channels of cooperation and mutual legal assistance agreements. This issue also applies when personal data are transferred by an EU company to a company in the US and when the data are subsequently processed for law enforcement purposes.
This sounds good – except that this issue is not explicitly addressed in the current EU legal framework. That is exactly the reason why (as the rapporteur knows perfectly well) we have the Data Protection Regulation, which the Commission put on the table on 25 January to try to provide additional legal clarity in these matters. The regulation makes it clear that transmissions can only take place when the conditions of the regulation for such transfers are met, notably when there is a justification on an important ground of public interest – and the public interest has to be recognised in Union law or in Member State law. This could involve, for instance, data transfer between competition authorities, tax and customs administrations, and it could also be for the prevention and investigation, detection and prosecution of criminal offences.
As you rightly said, this issue has been raised in the umbrella agreement on the protection of personal data. As Parliament has been informed, this negotiation is still continuing. For the moment, we have not yet reached a conclusion with this negotiation. As Parliament also underlined, this is an element which, for my colleague who is responsible for taxation, has to be seen in the framework of the FATCA regulations.
Here, I would like to make it very clear (this may be new information for Parliament) that the Commission has raised this issue with the United States regularly and intensively in the framework of the Financial Markets Regulatory Dialogue and, as a result of the discussion, on 6 February, the US announced that the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) should be complied with by the transfer of data between tax administrations rather than by the imposition of direct obligations on EU financial intermediaries. So that is good news, which now has to be put into a clear text. But this is the direction we want to go in, and the Commission will continue to work with the US and with the Member States in order to identify the best way to address this issue and achieve legal certainty and compliance with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
When I speak here about the United States, this means that it also applies to other third countries. The relations between the EU and the United States are those which are most discussed, but in future, we will certainly also have many discussions about other continents with which we have a specific relationship."@en1
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