EU Commissioner Reveals He Will Ignore Any Rejection of ACTA

Dupple tips a story at Techdirt about comments from EU commissioner Karel De Gucht, who made some discouraging remarks to the EU International Trade committee about the opposition to ACTA: "If you decide for a negative vote before the European Court rules, let me tell you that the Commission will nonetheless continue to pursue the current procedure before the Court, as we are entitled to do. A negative vote will not stop the proceedings before the Court of Justice. ... If the Court questions the conformity of the agreement with the Treaties we will assess at that stage how this can be addressed." De Gucht also spoke about proposing clarifications to ACTA if Parliament declined to ratify it, which, as Techdirt points out, doesn't make much sense: "Remember that ACTA is now signed, and cannot be altered; so De Gucht is instead trying to fob off European politicians with this vague idea of 'clarifications' — as if more vagueness could somehow rectify the underlying problems of an already dangerously-vague treaty."

Comments

Re:It will pass in some form

[UltimaBuddy]

If its passing is inevitable, I want it as hobbled and useless as possible.

Re:A country that is not a country.

[sociocapitalist]

This is the type of thing when you have something resembling a country, but that is not in essence a country, which has non of the protections or checks and balances that a state should actually have.

Democracy at the EU level, kind of a joke.

You say this, and yet democracy seems to be working better in Europe than in what is supposed to be a democratic America. In both cases you have a collection of States that make up a super-state. In the US, the States retain many powers that the Federal government is not allowed to fuck with. The same is true for the EU.

The EU has a multiplicity of political parties in each country, all of which are democratically elected, with the European Parliament being directly elected and with a rotating presidency of the EU itself that shifts to a different country every six months power is never focused too long in one place.

The countries in the EU provide checks and balances to each other, quite without meaning to. Because of the different interests that each country has, it's difficult for any given policy to be pushed through even by the strongest country or even set of countries in the Union.

So how, exactly, is democracy at the EU level a joke?