The European Parliament is ratcheting up pressure on European Union leaders to take a tough line with the United States in the wake of revelations about the scale and scope of US surveillance in Europe.

In two separate votes this week, on the protection of EU citizens’ data available to the US authorities, and on data-protection rules within the EU, MEPs took a line antithetical to American interests.

The votes came in the immediate aftermath of revelations published on Monday in the French newspaper Le Monde, that as recently as January the US was routinely recording millions of calls and messages each month made through French telecom networks.

The alleged targets of surveillance included internet company Wanadoo and Alcatel-Lucent, a giant French-American company that provides equipment for communication networks, raising the possibility of industrial espionage.

François Hollande, France’s president, called Barack Obama, the US president, to express his disquiet at the revelations.

Laurent Fabius, France’s foreign minister, said on Monday (21 October) that at an EU summit that is being held today and tomorrow in Brussels (24-25 October) France would call for rapid completion of a reform of the EU’s data-protection rules.

The surveillance scandal broke as the EU and US are supposed to be negotiating a free-trade deal. In any such deal, rules governing the telecoms sector and the digital economy more broadly are expected to figure prominently.

The European Parliament yesterday (23 October) urged EU member states to suspend an agreement that gives US counter-terrorism officials the possibility to look at data about bank transfers made by Europeans and carried through the SWIFT messaging network. The vote is not binding on the EU, because suspension of the agreement would require the backing of a weighted majority of member states, but it was an expression of discontent.

Another vote – on data protection within the EU – has greater political significance, because it will help to shape EU law. The Parliament’s civil-liberties committee approved the Parliament’s negotiating position on a draft data-protection regulation and accelerated negotiations, by deciding not to refer the proposal to the full Parliament for debate.

In both instances, leading members of Parliament buttressed their arguments by pointing to the need to respond to mass surveillance of EU citizens by the US.

Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green MEP who is Parliament’s lead negotiator on the data-protection regulation, called on leaders of the EU’s member states to “send a strong signal” on data protection when they meet for their summit, which is scheduled to give particular attention to the digital economy.

Details released previously by a US whistleblower, Edward Snowden, suggested that the US’s National Security Agency had extensive programmes in Europe and targeted EU buildings in Brussels and in the US. Snowden’s revelations also raised the possibility of commercial espionage, because the targets included the headquarters of the EU’s Council of Ministers.

His disclosures prompted the EU to initiate consultations about data-protection aspects of the surveillance programmes with the US authorities. They also marred the start of the transatlantic trade talks in July, because the EU insisted that from the start there should be consultations in parallel about the implications of the US’s surveillance operations on data protection.

Fabius described the consultations as “insufficient”, an argument that he said Hollande would make at the summit.

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The European Commission has also voiced dissatisfaction with the consultations. Cecilia Malmström, the European commissioner for home affairs, said earlier this autumn that she was unhappy with the response she had received from US counterparts on the allegations. She said that any systematic circumvention of the safeguards would constitute a serious breach of the SWIFT bank- data agreement.