New Anti Consumer Treaty (ACTA) Still Being Sneaked Through

[GhostShip]

Despite much protest by those who claim they are public servants, little information on the secret anti-consumer bill is reaching the public and its on purpose.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081106-european-group-tries-to-get-secret-acta-documents.html

Europe's Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) tried to get access this week to 12 secret EU documents on the treaty.
Groups concerned about the treaty, and about the fact that all the negotiation will be complete before it is presented for public viewing, have resorted to similar tactics to dig up information. In the US, the Freedom of Information Act has been used to request access to internal negotiation documents, while Canada's Access to Information Act has been successfully used to unearth at least a few pages of data.

In Europe, FFII hopes that its requests will meet with more success. FFII analyst Ante Wessels says that "parliaments cannot build an informed opinion about ACTA and therefore will not be well prepared to use their power."

In order to get the information it wants, the group hopes that a recent European Court of Justice ruling will support is position. That ruling found that the public has broad rights to preliminary legislative texts, since the "considerations underpinning legislative action is a precondition for the effective exercise of their democratic rights."

Of course those groups pushing this bill on behalf of fat cat commercial interests have no wish for the like of you and I to block their efforts to hide their villany under a cloud of legislation, in thier view overcharging for medicines and dvds is par for the course and of course not so good for the consumer, hence their reluctance to act in a democratic manner.

[GhostShip]

It seems undemocratic forces are indeed in play here.

http://press.ffii.org/Press_releases/EU_Council_refuses_to_release_secret_ACTA_documents

Brussels, 10th November 2008 - The EU Council of Ministers refuses to release secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) documents. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) had requested these documents to make public and parliamentary scrutiny possible. After the Council's refusal, the FFII sent in a confirmatory application, for the EU Council to review its position, as allowed by Article 7(2) of the regulation dealing with public access to such documents.

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.

The EU Council refuses to release the secret documents stating that disclosure of this information could impede the proper conduct of the negotiations, would weaken the position of the European Union in these negotiations and might affect relations with the third parties concerned.

The FFII reaffirms its application stating that the legislative process in the EU has to be open. If 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 scrutinise its contents in any meaningful way. To prevent this from happening, it may be necessary to renegotiate ACTA's transparency.

The FFII's confirmatory application letter questions ACTA's secrecy in no uncertain terms: "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?"

It could soon be it time to start pitching in with some emails to let folks know that we all oppose stealth legislation, to do nothing is not likley to be an option in this case