mr president this has been an extremely important debate
that is totally accurate because we talk about such important matters as how we can maintain the security of our citizens but also maintain good information and exchange systems with a high level of data protection
there have been as the president of the council said a few questions and a few misunderstandings i think
some of them are answered in the bruguière report so i would really encourage you to read that
but i think we need to understand and remember why we have an interim agreement
why do we have it
well it was because swift was moving and we were finding ourselves in a situation where we did not have a regulation on the transfer of data so the council and the commission moved swiftly to arrange something
we did achieve certain concessions from the united states and some very good data protection mechanisms
also two member countries concerned asked the commission to be involved in order to have a european approach on this and avoid bilateral agreements
this is important to recall
now this is an interim agreement as i said it can and it will be improved
it is the full intention of the commission and the council to involve the european parliament under the lisbon treaty in the permanent agreement
we need to have more clarification concerning redress lawful data processing and deletion of data
the permanent agreement will also include guarantees of rectification access to information
mr lambrinidis asked why the commission does not have that
well mr lambrinidis the commission has been in office for sixteen hours and twenty minutes
this is an extremely important negotiating mandate
we need to be able to discuss this together within the new commission before we formulate the full negotiating mandate to discuss with the european parliament
we have only very recently taken office so you could not expect us to have done this
but we will make sure and mr barroso expressed this very clearly in the letter to mr buzek that we are working on the negotiating mandate we will present it to the european parliament as soon as possible and make sure that you are fully informed the whole way on this
it might be a very good idea to postpone the vote and we might need more time to discuss the mandate
you will see the negotiation mandate you will have time to look at the papers the reports and so on and the commission is willing as i said to work together with you and the council for a good and much better permanent agreement on this
