For the first time in our history, a transatlantic agreement was rejected by the European Union. The case has its origin on the Belgium based SWIFT company which handles 80% of the world's electronic financial transfers from 208 countries.

Giving as a reason the fight against terrorism, after the 9/11 attacks, the US subpoenaed SWIFT to get access to bank transactions - including by most of Europe's banks . Meanwhile the old accord expired and a new temporary agreement between the European Union's Council of Ministers and Washington was agreed last November, but the SWIFT debate took place in the parliament in a Friday afternoon, when most of MEP’s were already gone, even if the Lisbon Treaty gave them the right to pronounce on these issues.

Because of all these procedure, a strong opposition among Members of the European Parliament came up and the Civil Liberties Committee voted against the agreement alleging that the SWIFT accord "violates the basic principles of data protection".

Before the debate in Strasbourg, Left wing MEP’s showed they’re against the untitled document “Terrorist Finance Tracking Program Agreement”.

Lothar Bisky, president of the Party of European Left and GUE/NGL group, declared that “SWIFT' Agreement was reached trough a doubtful process, in an attempt to avoid Parliament’s judgment, before Treaty of Lisbon came into force.  It seems that we are invited to agree on this `new sister' of the Big Brother. It is a mistake to allow the ample access to such data bases because this means that the people will not have more self-determination on its own data. The fact of this agreement being provisory does not mean that the data won’t continue to be stored by the North American authorities.  We need to fight the terrorism and its causes, but if we give up on our democratic rights, why should we fight against terrorism? I heard the European Union is a community of values. We are now sweeping these values underneath the carpet and my group will not agree with this ", concluded Bisky.