MEPs voice concerns over SWIFT data transfers

European politicians have voiced their concerns over the way Europol is handling requests for data from the US under the controversial SWIFT scheme, which gives the US the ability to access bank transfer information that it suspects has links to terrorism.

The Civil Liberties Committee of MEPs raised its concerns in response to a report by the Europol Joint Supervisory Body (JSB) from early March that said the first requests from the US could not be verified for compliance but were still approved regardless.

This was because the information demanded by Europol was only given orally and so there was no way for the JSB to confirm if the data was correctly released under the Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP).

As such, MEPs said this kowtowing to the US undermined the agreement made in the SWIFT scheme, with German MEP Alexander Alvaro claiming Europol's stance was harming the trust citizens have in the European Parliament.

"We voted in favour [of this agreement last year] in the trust that both parties would apply the adopted agreement [which] concerns the transfer of sensitive data belonging to our citizens," he said.

"The credibility of Parliament and of this committee are being jeopardised. This is about trust and confidence of the public in what the EU did and is capable of doing here."

Many MEPs, such as Greek representative Stavros Lambrinidis, repeated assertions that Europol was not suited to handling these requests and that a separate body needed to be set up.

"Europol should not have been the body to oversee this – we all underlined at the time that Europol should not have been entrusted with this role," he said

Maltese MEP Simon Busuttil added, "At the time of the negotiations last year we were not satisfied with having Europol controlling it – we wanted additional safeguards."

In light of this, the MEPs asked the director of Europol to come to the committee to explain his views on the situation.

V3.co.uk contacted Europol for comment on this matter but had received no reply at the time of publication.