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EU Patent Examiners Warn Parliament Will Have "No Power"
zoobab writes "The Staff Union of the European Patent Organisation sent a letter to the President of the European Parliament, warning that after the EU accedes to the European Patent Convention, there is a risk that the European Parliament would be 'circumvented' as a legislator. The European Patent Organisation is in no way a model of democracy: national patent offices are in power, there is no parliament involved in the decision-making process, and diplomatic conferences are held behind closed doors. There are plans to create a central patent court in Europe, which would operate in a democratic vacuum, not counterbalanced by any legislative assembly, in particular not the European Parliament. Such a central patent court could also validate software patents via caselaw (as the German Supreme Court recently did with the Microsoft FAT patent). And Microsoft, IBM, and SAP are lobbying in Brussels not to reopen consideration of the software patent directive."
The United Patent Litigation System replaces the EPLA. The official justifications are that it will decrease bureaucracy and costs. As a side effect (which is the real motivation of some pushers), it will push aside the European Parliament (which threw out swpats in 2005), and give more power to the European Patent Office (which approves almost as much as the USPTO does). More details:
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I have spent a fair amount of time in Brussels in recent years, starting with my campaign against software patents in Europe. While I understand what you mean to say with your criticism, I would disagree that the EU is inherently undemocratic, let alone antidemocratic.
The EU is a complex construct: it's neither a federation such as the United States or Germany nor an international organization such as the World Trade Organization. It's an in-between, it's a supranational alliance of countries, and that entails a setup in which the national governments of the EU Member States still wield a lot of power. Otherwise we would have (for better or worse, which is not the question) a system more similar to that of the United States, in which the sovereignty of each state is very limited compared to that of an EU Member State.
The original idea of a united Europe was a peace project. It was not about liberalizing markets, although even that is not necessarily against the interests of citizens. As someone who travels a lot in Europe, I can see some of the benefits that the EU has brought to citizens, such as the cap on mobile phone roaming charges that the EU imposed a few years ago.
The complexity of the EU's structures has the effect that only a limited number of people even understand how decisions are taken. There's probably just a minority of US citizens who know exactly all of the procedural possibilities concerning conciliation between the Senate and the House (such as the "deemed passed" principle that the Democrats were considering at some point to push the healthcare bill through), but at least people in the US will know their senators and probably also their congressmen (for their constituencies). Here in Europe, people generally don't know their MEPs (Members of the European Parliament). The media don't report because Brussels seems so remote, processes are complicated and time-consuming, and even when a legislative decision is taken, it usually takes time before it gets implemented by the Member States (enshrined in national laws) -- two years is the standard period that EU directives allow for that purpose. Most of the problems that people criticize when talking about the EU's "democratic deficit" could be solved by the Fourth Estate (the media), but there's a chicken-and-egg problem because citizens don't know about "Brussels" for lack of media coverage and the media don't report much for lack of interest by their audiences.
I also think one has to acknowledge in all fairness that the European Parliament's powers have been significantly enhanced by the Lisbon Treaty. I can understand if people say it was not enough, but there has certainly been progress, with now pretty much all decisions requiring the support of the Parliament (either through co-decision or assent procedures).