[Infowarrior] - EU refuses to release secret ACTA documents

[Richard Forno]

EU Council refuses to release secret ACTA documents

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?"

The Canadian government released documents under the Access to  
Information Act that provide additional insights into the secretive  
nature of the negotiations.

If the EU Council again refuses to release the secret documents, the  
FFII can take the case to the European Court of Justice. An earlier  
case on transparency of EU legislation took 6 years. By that time ACTA  
may long have entered into force.

Ante Wessels, FFII analyst, says: "We do not have so much time. The  
only solution we see is that the parliaments of Europe force the  
Council to publish the texts by making Parliamentary scrutiny  
reservations."

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