The European Parliament wants to avoid bulk transfers of personal data to the US in order to protect the privacy of EU citizens, it announced after debating a draft which will regulate the extent to which the US will be able to monitor Europeans' bank transactions though the SWIFT data exchange network.

This comes after the EP already blocked the existing agreement in February this year, which had allowed the US to monitor Europeans' bank transactions to combat terrorism by accessing SWIFT data.

The EP's view comes at a time of concerns that client privacy is under attack because of the desire of governments to crack down on tax evasion. The US government last year succeeded in partially breaching Swiss banking secrecy due to a deal to extract client data from UBS.

The new draft agreement will be discussed by the EU’s Council of Ministers on 23 April. The council is one of two legislative bodies of the EU (the other being the EP) and is composed of one minister from each member state. With regards to the SWIFT draft agreement, this will be the home affairs ministers.

After having been approved by the council, parliament will have the right to veto the new agreement.  

Access to the new draft is limited, although MEPs have been allowed to see it. Talks with the US will start after it has been passed by the council. The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, wants an agreement to be signed by the end of June.

"There is still talk, in these guidelines, of bulk data transfers," complained rapporteur Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, a Dutch MEP for the group of liberal parties in the EP known as ADLE.

An EP “rapporteur” reports between expert committees of the parliament and the plenum of MEPs, thus holding a key-role in the decision-making process in the EP.

"Even with this new mandate, the idea would be to transfer 90 million pieces of data each month," Hennis-Plasschaert added. She said that she was rather disappointed that the commission has not come up with an alternative to this issue, believing that a "dual approach" should be considered in which data would be processed on EU territory before being transferred.

Sophie In't Veld, another Dutch ADLE MEP, warned: "The US is looking for a needle and we're sending them the entire haystack."

She added: "The Koreans, Indians and Saudis will be asking us for data too, so let's not create a precedent.”

When the EP blocked the agreement in February this year, the BBC website quoted a US source calling this a "setback for EU-US counter-terror co-operation".

The rejected deal would have allowed the US to continue accessing SWIFT data, something Washington started secretly doing after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. It only became public in 2006.

SWIFT, which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, holds data of over 8,300 banking organisations, securities institutions and corporate customers in more than 200 countries.