The Obama administration’s intense lobbying to continue a global terrorist finance-tracking program likely will be decided by a hotly contested vote of the European Parliament today.
In the past week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has called and written the president of the parliament, Jerzy Buzek, urging that the 751-member body approve an interim agreement reached by U.S. and European Union negotiators in November that would allow the United States to continue to have access to bank-transaction data from Europe for counter terrorism investigations.
A source of contention for European lawmakers is that the pact was reached by U.S. officials and the Council of the European Union, the EU’s principal decision-making body, without the parliament’s involvement.
The U.S. program involves access to portions of vast databases of financial-transaction information held by a Brussels-based consortium of banks. The program was launched in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Its existence was revealed by The New York Times in 2006, touching off controversy, especially in Europe.
Lawmakers there were angry because they were not consulted beforehand, and European privacy officials said the program violated European data- protection laws.
U.S. access to the data has become an open question now that the European Parliament, under the Treaty of Lisbon, has acquired new power to review and approve initiatives that affect internal security, counter terrorism and law enforcement.
