European Commission Suggests ACTA's Opponents Don't Have 'Democratic Intentions'

from the what-planet-are-they-on? dept

Last week, we had a story about the IFPI (the international equivalent of the RIAA) saying that the ACTA protests were trying to "silence the democratic process". You might have thought that was bad enough, but here's worse.

Netzpolitik.org points us to leaked internal minutes of a meeting of the European Commission the day before the massive Europe-wide demonstrations against ACTA. They reveal the EU's top politicians taken aback by the scale of the planned demonstrations, but dismissing them with almost the same words as the IFPI (German original): ultimately it will be hard to convince civil society organizations [about the benefits of ACTA]. Represented among them are interests that do not reflect the wider community. Specific activities were observed that do not always live up to the supposedly democratic intentions. The minutes went on to detail some of the things people are up to: ACTA's opponents are trying to mobilize people against the agreement, in order to influence the remaining MS [Member States that have not yet signed] and EP [Parliament]. So the European Commission thinks that tens of thousands of people on the streets somehow don't reflect the wider community -- presumably unlike the small band of negotiators and lobbyists behind closed doors that drew up ACTA in secrecy for years, who do represent the European Union's 500 million people.

And the Commissioners are just shocked that the opponents of ACTA, who have been denied any meaningful transparency about what was being agreed to in their name during those now-concluded negotiations, are desperately trying to make their voices heard by the only institutions left that can listen: the EU nations that haven't signed ACTA, and the European Parliament that must still ratify it.

This suggests that the European Commission is completely out of touch with the people it supposedly serves, and still doesn't understand the growing anger that its arrogant approach and condescending tone continues to generate on the streets.

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Filed Under: acta, democratic intentions, eu commission, europe