madam president i shall be fairly brief
i think the oral question is very clear
we are currently working on a pnr package
the commission has prepared three draft mandates for negotiations with the united states canada and australia
in the meantime however the member states are negotiating bilaterally with the united states about the transfer of personal data or rather giving the united states access to european databases including passenger data
before this house can take a position on any pnr proposal or any pnr agreement we need to know what the situation is
if the member states are agreeing bilaterally with the united states to transfer pnr data then i wonder what we are doing in this house
i have also been told but there is no way of verifying this because the bilateral agreements and the bilateral negotiations are secret that it may concern pnr data of non-eu citizens or eu citizens on flights with destinations other than the united states and therefore they are not covered by a possible eu-us agreement
we need clarification on that before we continue the talks on pnr
finally commissioner last weekend i stumbled over another item that we have not been informed about and that might be relevant for this debate
it is a programme called one-stop security which the commission is apparently currently negotiating with the united states transport security authority
this would involve the lifting of security checks for us travellers coming to europe and vice versa
i find it rather strange that the security checks for european citizens travelling to the united states are becoming stricter and stricter we even have to pay for our esta electronic system for travel authorisation submission and at the same time the european commission is negotiating the lifting of security checks for americans coming this way
it is about time that the european commission informs us fully about this programme and about the state of the negotiations and i would like to know and i will conclude on that if it is indeed the case that the united states imposed the security standards which would make this programme possible
