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Date:
Thread:
[Fwd: [Patents] Put Parliaments in Charge of Lawmaking]
To: sslug@sslug
Subject: [Fwd: [Patents] Put Parliaments in Charge of Lawmaking]
From: Erik Josefsson <sslug@sslug>
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2006 11:53:38 +0100
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 (X11/20060918)
Hartmut skriver: "thinking this through over and over again".
Jeg syns det er virkelig tænkvært.
//Erik
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Patents] Put Parliaments in Charge of Lawmaking
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 10:20:26 +0100 (CET)
From: PILCH Hartmut <sslug@sslug>
To: sslug@sslug
the epla bandwagon has recently regained some steam, and the call to
restore parliamentary democracy in Europe may seem a bit over-ambitious,
not an immediate enough remedy for the near fire. Yet, thinking this
through over and over again, I can't find much of a solution for
"democratic control" and "judicial independence" (two EP key demands)
without very far-reaching reform, and that is probably also the reason
that the Venice Judges recently ignored these two demands (and even the
third one, "litigation costs"), and just pressed ahead quickly to
provide a draft "rules of procedure for the EPLA court".
Below is the reasoning on parliamentary review of European central court
caselaw.
---
# title: Put Parliaments, not Courts in Charge of European Lawmaking
# descr: All statutory laws and rules applied by any new European
judicial institutions must directly be subject to review by elected
legislators; the signatory states should transfer the related
legislative power to the European Parliament, while assigning veto
rights to a quorum of national parliaments. We explain why this is
necessary and how it works.
# url: http://a2e.de/ffii/epla/cpedu/parl
- The European Union produces large amounts of bad laws laws,
characterised by
- clumsy, ambiguous language, difficult for courts to interpret
- conflicts with constitutional principles of the member states,
leading to partial rejection by constitutional courts
- orientation toward special interests and hidden agendas
- This is so
- The laws are negotiated by diplomats and civil servants behind
closed doors.
- The diplomats look for formula compromises, at the expense of clarity.
- The civil servants tend to be receptive to powerful lobby groups
who strive to strengthen monopolies for their own benefit.
- Most national parliaments do not have any real influence on the
behaviour of their country in the legislative organs of the European Union.
- The European Parliament has very limited power. Its role is
usually that of adding to the bloat of legal texts by means of cosmetic
amendments. When it disagrees with the civil servants, all it can do is
to block a directive, while the civil servants still have the option to
pursue the same legislative goal by other means.
- The European Union is systematically used by national ministries
as a means of circumventing their own parliaments, also called
"legislative laundering"
- The European legislative process is bulky and inefficient. This
leads to a de facto transfer of legislative functions to other fora,
such as courts.
- The European Commission is openly advocating the creation of a
European Court as a means of "harmonizing the rules of patentability",
i.e. as a replacement for the software patent directive which it failed
to push through the European Parliament.
- The independence of national high courts is really the only
remaining corrective against the usurpation of legislative power by the
judiciary (which, in the case of the European patent system, lacks
independence).
- The European Patent Organization creates laws by means of diplomatic
conferences. This process suffers from the same flaws as the process of
EU lawmaking (i.e. domination by unelected lawmakers, inefficiency,
bulkiness, weakening of the legislative function), but is better in one
sense: the national parliaments are still free to reject the result of
the negotiations.
- The bandwagon of the Europeanisation of the judiciary, in particular
the patent judiciary, is continuing to roll. Politicians, "industry"
and media continue to be seduced by the gains in efficiency that a
centralised European judiciary is assumed to bring.
- Under these circumstances we need to think about creating an
efficient and independent elected legislative power at the same level,
i.e. that of Europe. When the European Court develops new rules (e.g.
decides that program claims are acceptable), there will be an elected
and effective legislative institution that can review these rules and
pass laws to correct them.
- In the draft EPLA treaty, the treaty's signatory states assign
judicial power to a supranational court, for the sake of efficiency.
- In the same way, the signatory states could assign legislative power
to a supranational parliament.
- Because of the problems described above, it is not a good idea to
assign legislative power to the EU. The EU's design is broken, with or
without the new constitution.
- However, there is a way in which the EU institutions could be used
by the EPLA++ treaty.
- The European Parliament would serve as the upper chamber of the EPLA
parliament. It would not be the European Parliament as such, just the
European Parliament acting in the function of the legislative organ of
the EPLA treaty.
- A certain quorum, probably less than 50%, of citizens represented by
their national parliaments, could thus jointly veto a decision by the
European Parliament. The citizens of Switzerland, who are not
represented in the European Parliament, would have double weight in this
forum.
- The Council could serve as a body of emissaries from the national
parliaments. They would non-bindingly advise the European Parliament to
adopt certain changes, so as to avoid a later rejection vote by the
national parliaments.
- In this way, the member states would retain all the sovereignty that
they retain in the current European Union. Compared to the EPC or draft
EPLA treaty, they would lose the right to reject a revision
unilaterally. However the peoples of the member states would gain the
right to collectively determine the rules through elected
intermediaries, and thus in reality gain in sovereignty.
- The European Union itself is an accumulation of disparate treaties.
Rather than consolidate these treatise into one and thereby create an
new state-like moloch with a life of its own, the member states should,
by means of accumulation of further treaties on special areas such as
patent law, try to improve the current structure.
- One might ask if deepening of European integration is needed at all.
But if it is needed, and the push for EPLA implicitely affirms that it
is needed, then accumulation of new treaties that create democratic
legislative overview at the European level is the way to go.
--
Hartmut Pilch http://a2e.de/phm
Vice president of the FFII http://a2e.de/ffii
Protecting the Knowledge Economy from Legal Over-Regulation
Last modified
2006-12-01, 02:02 CET
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