The US violated SWIFT agreement unilaterally
EU-US Agreement: US violated basic privacy provisions rights in the treaty
The EU has just experienced refusals from the US to honour their part of the deal on bank data monitoring, and are thinking about withdrawing from the agreement.
The US-EU agreement on bank data exchange "SWIFT" was supposed to offer transparency about bank transactions, but it has been completely one sided, as the Americans failed to honour their side of the agreement: While the US has been getting all the data they wanted, EU officials have been basically denied access.
Yesterdat one EU parliamentarian tried in vain to determine whether US officials had accessed his own bank transactions.
The EU Parliament had only approved the SWIFT agreement with the US because the US asked for that, with much reluctance.
This agreement basically allows the US to monitor the data regarding EU bank customers data to US investigators. It would have been reasonable to assume that the US honoured the deal returning the favour and making sure that the agreement worked. They didn't.
It seems that the US arrogant foreing policy has created a situtation where the Europeans fully disclose their citizen's bank movements to the US, while the US keeps mum on their bank wiretapping and monitoring, essentially not providing the agreed feedback. This situation has been compared to the extradition agreements between the US and UK, where Britain is obliged to turn over their citizens to US courts, while US citizens cannot be extradited to UK after fleeing back home to the US.
The provisions of the SWIFT agreeement have routinely been ignored, where reasons for turning in information received by Europol were routinely justified with very vague references, unusufficient to decide on their merit, noted the Europol Joint Supervisory Body (JSB).
Despite all this the EU dutifullky agreed to every single request from the US, actually forfeiting the monitoring of the process on their side.
However, every EU citizen has the right to know whether American authorities had accessed his personal banking data, and, if so, which federal organisations accessed that.
Alexander Alvaro, a German member of EU Parliament belonging to the "Free Democrats" party, tried to exert his own right to transparency and filed a request to obtain the information he was entitled to, as an EU citizen, by the SWIFT agreement.
However the German authorities couldn't find out whether Alvaro's banking information was accessed by the US, because the US did not let them know.
This means that the privacy right any EU citizen is entitled to, which guarantees correction, deletion or blockage of the data are being violated unilaterally by the US, and that the SWIFT treaty is only being obeyed by the EU. |
