EU USA SWIFT or TFTP Agreement officially published

Late November 2009 we wrote about the upcoming decision of the Council of the European Union to approve the so called SWIFT Agreement to hand over European banking data to the United States, and early December we reported on the decision, taken on the last day before the Lisbon Treaty entered into force.

The Decision by the Council of the European Union on the signing of the so called SWIFT or TFTP Agreement has now been officially published:



COUNCIL DECISION 2010/16/CFSP/JHA of 30 November 2009 on the signing, on behalf of the European Union, of the Agreement between the European Union and the United States of America on the processing and transfer of Financial Messaging Data from the European Union to the United States for purposes of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program; Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) 13.1.2010 L 8/9.


This contains the formal decision on signing, as well as a provision and declaration on provisional application of the Agreement.



The annexed contents of the SWIFT Agreement are here:




AGREEMENT between the European Union and the United States of America on the processing and transfer of Financial Messaging Data from the European Union to the United States for purposes of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program; OJEU 13.1.2010 L 8/11.

The TFTP Agreement is in force until 31 October 2010, but the parties have undertaken to negotiate for a long-term agreement (Article 15).




Ralf Grahn



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