Four years after rejecting a program to track terrorist financing over budgetary and data privacy concerns, the European Union is reconsidering the project following a string of deadly attacks in the United Kingdom and throughout the 28-nation bloc.
EU lawmakers will discuss controversies later this month surrounding an agreement to share data on terrorist financing with the United States after parliamentarians Thursday called aspects of the deal "unjust."
Defense attorneys are hoping to overturn convictions against their clients in dozens of money laundering, drug and other cases that they say may have been based on undisclosed national security data.
Over a year after outlining alternatives to a controversial U.S.-EU bank data-sharing arrangement, European Union leaders have yet to disclose how they would give American terrorism investigators access to sensitive financial information.
The European Union and the United States move ahead with negotiations over Swift interbank data and a New York court sentences an alleged terrorist financier to ten years in prison, in this week's news roundup.
The rejection by the EU Parliament Thursday of a data sharing agreement with the United States is likely to leave U.S. investigators without timely access to European banking data for the second month in a row.
The EU Council passed a controversial agreement Monday to extend the access of U.S. counterterrorism investigators to European financial data by another nine months.
European Union justice ministers agreed Friday on guidelines for the sharing of personal data among law enforcement agencies and European courts, giving European citizens greater assurances of privacy in terrorism and criminal cases.