AFP- Senior EU and US officials insisted Saturday that European air passengers had nothing to fear from seeing their personal data analysed by US intelligence despite a court challenge by EU lawmakers.
US homeland security chief Tom Ridge said after talks with the European Union's Dutch presidency that he agreed on the need to safeguard civil liberties in the war on terrorism.
"That discussion (on exchanging information) will never take place independently of the very important discussion on how we collectively do it in a way that protects civil liberties and privacy," he told a news conference.
But the European Parliament, angry at what it says is an attack on personal freedoms, is suing the EU's executive commission for agreeing with Washington to hand over private information on European airline passengers.
The EU-US agreement on so-called passenger name records (PNR) has become a flashpoint exposing transatlantic tensions on how best to pursue terrorism. The PNR data include a passenger's credit-card records and travel history.
Ridge and Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner said their meeting, which was joined by EU justice commissioner Antonio Vitorino, would be followed up by annual political contacts to ensure safeguards on the PNR scheme were met.
Vitorino said he regretted that those safeguards, which include a right to redress so that EU citizens can ask to check the information held on them by US intelligence agencies, had failed to persuade the EU legislature.
"It is quite clear we did not succeed in persuading the European Parliament in this respect, but we hope that we will be able to sustain our position before the court," the Portuguese commissioner said.
Donner said the two sides had also discussed extremists' financial networks, sharing intelligence and "biometric identifiers" in passports, such as fingerprints.
The US Congress has postponed a requirement for all EU citizens to have such high-tech identifiers in their travel documents before travelling to the United States, by a year to October 2005.
The Dutch minister said both sides were convinced of the necessity for "a balanced approach to protection from terrorists and protection of individual rights".
The PNR scheme was one of a raft of measures imposed unilaterally by the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
After a year of negotiations, the European Commission agreed in May on a legal arrangement with Washington.
But the deal, signed in May, has been fiercely opposed by human rights groups and the EU's directly-elected parliament, which formally asked in June for the European Court of Justice to annul the agreement.
The legal avenue "reflects the concern felt by a large majority of the European Parliament on the need to defend European citizens' fundamental rights and freedoms", parliament president Pat Cox said at the time.
Ridge said the US government was confident that the Luxembourg-based EU court would uphold the PNR agreement.
"But even with a favourable ruling, within a year or so we've agreed to meet again just to take a look at the safeguards and to... make sure that our friends in the European Parliament are satisfied that what we thought could be delivered was delivered," he said.