[A2k] Nate Anderson: EU denies ACTA document request; democracy undermined?

[Manon Ress]

[Click on the link to find more documents such as the request, the
reply etc...]


EU denies ACTA document request; democracy undermined?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081111-eu-denies-acta-document-reque=
st-democracy-undermined.html

By Nate Anderson | Published: November 11, 2008 - 12:26PM CT

The EU has turned down a request for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade
Agreement (ACTA) documents filed by the Foundation for a Free
Information Infrastructure (FFII). In a letter to the group, the EU
said simply that "the documents contain negotiating directives for the
negotiation of the above  mentioned agreement. These negotiations are
still in progress. Disclosure of this information could impede the
proper conduct of the negotiations."

FFII has already appealed the ruling. It wants to know what's going on
with ACTA so that the final agreement cannot simply be presented as a
fait accompli ready for signing, but getting any real information from
the EU has proven just as challenging as it has from other governments.

While governments like the US, Canada, and the EU have indicated that
ACTA will not introduce new laws, but simply help with commercial-
scale counterfeiting and piracy enforcement, observers have been
skeptical. Big Content has weighed in with suggestions of everything
from ISP filtering to anti-camcording laws, and digital rights groups
want a seat at the table if the agreement will in fact be an attempt
to sneak legislation into law under the guise of a trade agreement.

But trade agreements are negotiated secretly, unlike legislation,
which leads the FFII to wonder about the state of European democratic
practice:

     ACTA is a so-called "trade agreement". While technically it is
therefore not a legislative proposal, its acceptance will nonetheless
lead to legislative and executive obligations for the undersigning
parties. Hence, indirectly it will have the same effect as a
legislative proposal. Simply calling it differently and using
different negotiation procedures cannot be used as an excuse in a
democratic society to get around all transparency principles and
requirements of said society.

     If, as currently planned, the agreement will only be made public
once all parties have already agreed to it, none of the EU's national
parliaments nor the European Parliament will have been able to
scrutinize its contents in any meaningful way. We believe this to be a
gross violation of the basic democratic principles the EU is supposed
to stand for. The argument that public transparency regarding "trade
negotiations" can be ignored if it would weaken the EU's negotiation
position is particularly painful. At which point exactly do
negotiations over trade issues become more important than democratic
law making? At 200 million euro? At 500 million euro? At 1 billion
euro? What is the price of our democracy?

Secrecy, spies, and ACTA

ACTA has been, in its way, a boon to trade negotiators. "Trade
negotiator" lacks a certain cachet among the general public, but ACTA
speculation has suddenly transformed these bureaucrats into 007-like
creatures dealing in secrets, consorting with villains, operating in
shadows to implement dastardly plans.

As the FFII puts it, "ACTA's secrecy fuels concerns that the treaty
may give patent trolls the means to extort companies, undermine access
to low-cost generic medicines, lead to monitoring all citizens'
Internet communications and criminalize peer-to-peer electronic file
sharing." Yowza=97sounds like something cooked up by Dr. Evil, no?

Even if the darkest fears of anti-ACTA groups tend toward the
hyperbolic, the entire ACTA process provides a textbook example of how
secrecy alone can transform something as dull as a trade agreement
into conspiracy fodder=97and how a generation raised on Wikileaks and
blogging won't stand for it. The expectation of the Internet
generation is for transparency, and the rise of the web means that
scattered communities will find each other and will scrutinize even
trade agreements like ACTA.


***************************************************************************
Manon Ress
manon.ress@keionline.org
Knowledge Ecology International
1621 Connecticut Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20009 USA
Tel.:  +1.202.332.2670, Fax: +1.202.332.2673