Ministers approve extension of SWIFT transaction sharing with US

The Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) manages international payments between banks. It hit the headlines in 2006 when it was discovered that transfer details were being monitored by US authorities.

The organisation owned a 'mirror' server in the US which duplicated all the activity logged on its European machine. That server was being monitored by US authorities in a way which EU data protection commissioners said was unlawful.

SWIFT's customers are the major banks, and it has told OUT-LAW.COM that it allowed the authorities in the US to access its data because it felt bound by a subpoena in a country in which it operated.

Independent EU privacy advisory body the Article 29 Working Party said that the actions broke EU privacy law.

"As far as the communication of personal data to the US Treasury is concerned, the Working Party is of the opinion that the hidden, systematic, massive and long-term transfer of personal data by SWIFT to the US Treasury in a confidential, non-transparent and systematic manner for years without effective legal grounds and without the possibility of independent control by public data protection supervisory authorities constitutes a violation of the fundamental European principles as regards data protection and is not in accordance with Belgian and European law," it said in 2007.

The Belgian and Swiss data protection authorities said that the activity also broke their laws.

At a meeting of the EU's Council of Ministers, ministers from all 27 member states agreed that the US should continue to have access to banking data.

"The Council approved guidelines for negotiations with the United States for an international agreement to make financial payment messaging data available to the US Treasury Department in order to prevent terrorism and terrorist financing," said a statement from the Council.

Under an interim deal the US has access to the information that passes through the US server but The European Commission's Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Jacques Barrot told a press conference this week that he wants to extend those rights to databases held in the EU.

"It would be extremely dangerous at this stage to stop the surveillance and the monitoring of information flows," Barrot said, according to news service Associated Press (AP). He said that any deal that gave access to EU-only transactions would also increase privacy protections.

SWIFT plans to open a new data centre later this year in Switzerland that would only deal with EU transactions, and negotiations will centre on what access US authorities can have to this database.