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NSA activities "unacceptable," says CoE Assembly President

Xinhua, June 27, 2015 Adjust font size:

"It's unacceptable what the NSA was doing and is continuing to do," declared Anne Brasseur, President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), on Friday during a press conference in Strasbourg, speaking in response to this week's revelations of American spying on French heads of state.

The activist website Wikileaks, founded by Julian Assange, revealed on Tuesday that U.S. intelligence services, National Security Agency, had put three French presidents - Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande - under surveillance, provoking anger from French officials.

The revelations echoed the 2013 discovery that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's private phone had been tapped by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), and which created tensions between the United States and its German allies.

"But I'm not just talking about the United States," President Brasseur clarified. "In most of our countries the intelligence services developed a sort of self-dynamic and it's out of control."

When asked to reflect on last year's surveillance scandals in Poland, the PACE President underlined the widespread nature of the problem.

"No country is sheltered from these tentacular intelligence services," Brasseur affirmed.

To illustrate her point, the president, originally from Luxembourg, recalled a 2007 scandal in her home nation where the head of secret services at the time, Marco Mille, secretly recorded a conversation with then Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, now President of the European Commission, forcing the latter to resign from office.

"It even happens in my country," the PACE President quipped, noting Luxembourg's relatively small size.

For the PACE President, however, the problems invoked by the spying revelations related to more than politicians being put under surveillance.

"We, as politicians, have the responsibility not only to protect our countries and our leaders, but also the citizens," the President stressed.

"There must be a control from those who are in charge, and those who are in charge are the elected persons," she continued, "and there we need a parliamentary control."

President Brasseur's statements echoed an April resolution from the PACE general assembly on mass surveillance techniques, which condemned the use of "large-scale intrusion practices," and called for "a legal and a technical frame work" to be put in place "at the national and international level."

For Brasseur, the legal question becomes one of accountability. She said: "There needs to be a legal framework, and those people working in [intelligence] services, they cannot be above the law." Endit