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Follow us on twitterThe Telecoms Package - a failure for democracy
23rd October 2009 17:09 | by Philip Hunt
(Note: this article was written by Will Tovey, not Cabalamat/Philip Hunt)
This week has seen some rather worrying developments in Europe. Thursday saw the final barrier to France's three strikes law removed as the Constitutional Court ruled that it was legal. This is the first such law to be passed specifically to target illegal file-sharers and is unlikely to be the last. This action was supported by the recent progress made in Brussels with the notorious Telecoms Reform Package, legislation that will decide what restrictions can be placed on disconnected Internet users.
The Telecoms Package was first proposed over two years ago and at its first reading (September 2008), the European Parliament amended the legislation to ensure that...
Despite the French president directly intervening by Amendment 46 (previously Amendment 138). This was then put before the European Parliament which supported this overwhelmingly (by 88%) in May 2009. As a result of this impasse between the Parliament (elected by people from all member states) and the European Council of Ministers (an appointed senior representative from each state), a Conciliation Committee was set up to negotiate a compromise. During this process, the French authorities broke protocol by directly contacting a Swedish MP who was told her support of Amendment 46 was "problematic" (the French Embassy in Stockholm admitted meeting with her but denied trying to influence her opinion and so interfere with Swedish procedures)."no restriction [could] be imposed on ... end-users without a prior ruling of the judicial authorities ... except when public security is threatened, in which case the ruling may be subsequent." (Amendment; (8) d) ii) h)
The Council presented a proposed alteration to the Amendment, but this was widely regarded as unacceptable as it removed the requirement of judicial rulings in cases involving "the prevention, investigation, detection, and prosecution of criminal offences", once again ignoring the opinions of over 400 MEPs. Then, when the negotiators met with the Council they only discussed this proposal, not the original Amendment 46, ignoring the mandate given to them by the delegation. Christian Engström (MEP for the Swedish Pirate Party and a member of the delegation) openly criticised the chairman of the delegation for this. The French "rapporteur", Catherine Trautmann also came under fire for consciously abandoning Parliament's proposal. Engström and his colleagues nevertheless worked with the delegation in an attempt to undo the damage, submitting a new proposal for the negotiators which, while not as strong as the original Amendment 138, still required that any sanctions be taken only in "extreme circumstances" and by a "prior, fair and impartial procedure". It also removed the specific cases mentioned above involving criminal offences.
However, in what was described this week as an "insult to the parliament", the Ministers ignored the delegation and removed from the proposal the references to "extreme circumstances", "prior" procedures and replaced the loop-hole for "criminal offences" - undoing all the work of the Parliament and delegation. Engström summarised his response by saying that by this, the Council has shown "utter contempt for Parliament by totally ignoring everything it says".
This proposal, if passed, would pave the way for more countries to institute procedures for cutting people off from the Internet without judicial process as France has already done (with the French Constitutional Court announcing its approval of the law the same day as the above incident). Could this mark the end of a free and open Internet? Pirate Party UK condemns this action and recommends that all relevant individuals contact their representatives on the delegation to remind them of their mandate to represent both the European Parliament (who voted for the original Amendment 138) and the people of the EU.