"This is a resolution by a virtually unanimous parliament, but it is not formally binding for the Commission. If they want to ignore us, they technically can."
Can someone please help me understand "who" this ACTA commission is and under what government(s) authority it is operating? Its all very mysterious, reminds me of the WTO. Throughout the 90s, you'd heard news about WTO meets with zero explanation as to who there were and under what authority they operated.
There's three major bodies in EU: the Commission, the Council, and the Parliament.
The European Parliament is directly elected by the people, has 736 members, and each member is part of one of (currently) seven groups usually depending on which group is closest politically to their actual political party in the home country. The biggest groups are the conservatives, the social democrats, liberals, greens and christian democrats.
Then you have the council of ministers which consists of the executive branches of all member states, which makes it sort of elected by the people. The council has legislative power together with the parliament, but no EU-wide executive power, since their actual job is to govern their own countries. They are also responsible for implementing EU directives locally.
Finally you have the European Commission which is the EU-wide executive branch. Each country's executive branch appoints one commissioner each, which makes them twice removed from being elected (and of course criticized for it). They don't have legislative power, but they can suggest legislation for the parliament to vote on. It is this body that is participating in the ACTA negotiations on behalf of the EU member nations, so that each country's executive branch doesn't have to.
In other words: the parlament has not much power. We've seen this too many times. I've followed how other issues like the three strikes laws and software patents have been managed and it's disheartening. Even when the parlament voted massively against, the Commission and the lobbies seem to work this way around every time :-(
"We are not supporting and will not accept that an eventual Acta agreement creates an obligation to disconnect people from the internet because of illegal downloads"
Now if we could only get the USA to do the same. Maybe they've gotten over their neutral stance on transparency, maybe not, but in a friggin' (ideally a) democracy opacity in something like this is unethical.
So that's going to be our victory then? We'll be getting a new copyright law with more term extensions, three strikes, ISP enforcement, and god only knows what else they manage to cook up, but at least we get to read it before congress passes it? That sure makes it better.
But this is just the beginning. This is a resolution by a virtually unanimous parliament, but it is not formally binding for the Commission. If they want to ignore us, they technically can. Then we will have to fight on
And once we do get access to the documents, the fight over the content of the agreement will begin in earnest. This was a big win, but it was only a battle. Most of the war remains.
