The European Commission today is due to present a communication on different options for an EU Terrorism Finance Tracking System (EU TFTS) following last year's deal with the European Parliament in return for approving an agreement to transfer data from SWIFT, under strict conditions, to the United States for the purpose of combating international terrorism.  However the communication falls short of the legal and technical framework for the extraction of data on EU territory that the Commission was invited to submit within a year of the entry into force of the SWIFT agreement.

Alexander Alvaro (FDP, Germany), EP rapporteur on TFTS, said:

"After difficult negotiations, the European Parliament had approved the so-called SWIFT Agreement last year only because of the commitment from the Commission to submit its own proposal for an EU TFTS to Parliament and Council within a year. We have repeatedly highlighted the fact, that we are expecting a legal proposal and not just a compilation of options. Our principal and principled objections to the SWIFT Agreement consequently still stand."

"From a Liberal group perspective we would favour the option that represents the least invasion of personal privacy. We do not want a copy of the US intelligence system, but rather a slim, efficient and targeted extraction system with clear access rights and the quickest possible termination of the current transfers of bulk data to the US."