An insult to the Parliament

This is a translation of an entry in Swedish that I posted yesterday.

Thursday October 22, there was a trialogue meeting about the telecoms package. The three negotiators representing the European Parliament met with representatives for the Council om Ministers to discuss a text to replace the famous Amendment 138.

The Council of Ministers presented the following proposal. Additions in bold compared to the text agreed by the Parliaments delegation in the October 20 meeting, deletions crossed out.

3a. Measures taken by Member States regarding end-users’ access to or use of services and applications through electronic communications networks shall respect the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons, as guaranteed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and general principles of Community law.

Any of the above measures liable to restrict those fundamental rights or freedoms may therefore only be taken in exceptional circumstances and imposed if they are appropriate, proportionate and necessary within a democratic society, and shall be subject to adequate procedural safeguards in conformity with the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and with general principles of Community law, including effective judicial protection and due process. In particular, any These measures may only be adopted as a result of a prior, shall respect the requirements of a fair and impartial procedure ensuring inter alia that the principle of presumption of innocence and including the right to be heard of the person or persons concerned be fully respected. Furthermore, and the right to an effective and timely judicial review shall be guaranteed.

This shall not affect the competence of a Member State, in conformity with its own constitutional order and with fundamental rights, inter alia, to establish a requirement of a judicial decision authorising the measures to be taken and to adopt urgent measures in order to assure national security, defence, public security and the prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of criminal offences.

Please feel free to compare this text to the texts previously presented by the Council and the Commission.

If you don’t feel like digging into text comparisons, I’ll provide an executive summary:

The Council has removed all amendments that the Parliament inserted to guarantee that nobody will be shut off from the Internet without at least a prior trial, and reverted to a position that is identical in substance to what the Council and the Commission have previously proposed.

An even more executive summary:

The Council shows its complete contempt for the Parliament by totally ignoring its views. The ministers intend to teach the Parliament a lesson, and once and for all show who’s in charge.

This procedure is called ”co-decision”, in case anyone wondered. It is often cited as an example of how democratic the European Union is.

Attachment: The document from the Council as pdf.

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Others about the proposal from the Council (in Swedish): DN, Hax

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