5 ms·

It strikes me as somewhat 1984-ish / Orwellian This is a trade agreement! I assume it has no provisions for 'extraordinary rendition' of mp3 downloaders ?

• oelewapperke 15y ago
  Well it is. It is also how the EU is run. One of the provisions of EU membership is that international treaties have the same status -at least- of a country's constitution. The catch ? These agreements are made by the executive alone. In most European countries this is a well-established legal situation, and it has been applied to no end of sordid practices, from "bigamy" for unemployment checks (e.g. a muslim comes into the country, works for a week, gets fired, then he and his family have the right to unemployment. 20 women come in, are "married" to him (but also unofficially married to someone else) and all get permanent residency and unemployment), to not applying country constitutions, or laws to their own political officials, and now extending into copyright. No doubt software patents won't be far behind. But this is a way lots of unconstitutional laws have been applied in the EU (in a Belgian court decision in 2003 a judge agreed that, yes, the constitution states that no laws are in effect in Belgium except those voted on by (one of the) parliaments, but it was ruled that international treaties, like all EU directives override the constitution). Given the structure of the EU commission, this de-facto means the EU has the legal framework of a dictatorship (the EU commission is not elected) with a few local semi-democracies below it. It is my hope that the EU does fall apart.