The commission needs to be neutered before the EU can be considered truly democratic. The fact that this guy can come straight out and say he's going to ignore court rulings and the democratic will of the elected MEPs with no fear of reprisals, because he's not elected, yet he can hold so much power ... it's sick.
Sadly the parliament is essentially a powerless organ by design. The problem is that the european commission accumulates both executive power and most of the legislative power, where the later should lie with parliament.
The end result is that the parliament is basically a farcical attempt to give the appearance of democratic legitimacy to the EU legislative process, but the farce is transparent enough that it just ends up tainting the public perception of the EU institutions.
There are political reasons for this arrangement of course, but I don't want to turn this into (more of) a rant. [EDIT: I end up going into that in this other post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4161285]
The Parliament is not so impotent since the new codecision rules under the Lisbon Treaty and has been happy to flex its new-found muscles. Moreover, if the responses to my letter to my MEPs on this subject are at all indicative, most or all of the major political groups in Brussels are outright hostile to ACTA at this point.
I suspect De Gucht may have overestimated his influence here. He has also perhaps forgotten that his term of office is not so long and that the European Parliament could even hold up the appointment of the next Commission if it wanted to make a point about abuse of authority. (It did hold up the first Barroso commission in 2004, forcing a reshuffle of which commissioner was given which portfolio, so this is certainly not an idle threat for the Parliament to make, either.)
Sounds like it's time for them to do just that - if this sort of open contempt for the democratic process and the rule of law doesn't qualify as adequate grounds, nothing does.
What's the best channel by which to call for that action?
This is just sophistry now. The commissioner is playing the role he's supposed to play in the EU institutions, and I have seen no indication that he's done anything illegal or held the parliament in contempt.
> I have seen no indication that he's done anything illegal or held the parliament in contempt
He's said he will ignore the decisons arrived at by the democratically elected representatives of the people. That seems a pretty clear indication to me.
No, he's said he will continue to seek the legal advice of the ECJ regardless of whether or not parliament agrees with the current solution, so that depending on the decisions by the ECJ and the decision by parliament, they can look at how to address issues to make it possible for parliament to agree to a revised proposal.
Nothing in what he said indicates he wants to try to overrule the parliament, only that the EU executive branch believes ACTA is important, and so if the current solution is not approved by parliament they want all the information they can on how to make it acceptable.
We might not like that he's likely to try to go back for a second try with what will likely be relatively unsubstantial changes, but it is not unusual for proposals to be revised and revisited.
What the parent commenter is saying is that he is technically acting within the legal bounds of his office. That is, impeachment will be impossible unless an actual violation of law is found.
> That is, impeachment will be impossible unless an actual violation of law is found.
The European parliament can't impreach the commission. What it can do is sack them (but all of them, not just one). No evidence of illegality is needed.
That's unfortunate but, put them all on the street. Maybe the next group will make sure no single member does something this idiotic and gets them all fired for it.
The issue here is that the EU currently is a de facto confederation.
The EU parliament can not be, and is not, the supreme legislative body for the simple reason that the member states are still sovereign, with the ability to withdraw (though there are some legal questions in some member countries about how that would be possible).
It is the same issue facing the US under the Articles of Confederation, where Congress was effectively powerless to do anything without full agreement of the states.
However the EU "worked around" this in part with the Council and Commission functioning as a sort of an "office of the president" (consisting of heads of the member states and the head of the Commission and a separate Council president) and cabinet respectively, with power delegated from the respective governments of the member states rather than from the parliament.
It is a "workaround" for the fact that a federal EU is currently entirely unpalatable to the electorate in most European countries to make the EU governable - ironically because people are worried about giving the EU more power, while the current arrangement is worse in that regard.
Probably. But the point is you can't do that in a binding way without having the national governments cede sovereignty through constitutional amendments, which instantly causes public uproar.
E.g. under the UK constitution (yes, the UK has a constitution, it is just not codified in a single act) the UK Parliament is sovereign, to the extent that it can not even bind future parliaments.
So without tricky constitutional changes (particularly tricky because parliament has pretty much "bootstrapped" its own constitutional powers in the UK into a position were giving them away again will need to be very carefully structured to stand up in court) it is pretty much impossible to grant the EU parliament any real power.
This is part of why the current structure of the EU uses a web of treaties to bind the executives of the member states in various to seek the passage of local laws to implement EU directives, with convoluted measures to cajole the national legislatives to follow through. It's still not ironclad - plenty of directives languish in national parliaments for years before being implemented (or get implemented with inconsistent differences in different member countries) exactly because the EU has very few means to push it through - but it's a far stronger method than trying to tie the national parliaments with no constitutional support.
My country, and I'm sure most of the EU, isn't sovereign anymore when it comes to transposing EU laws^W directives (assuming they regard a domain where the EU is allowed to legislate, I suppose). The constitutional amendment was done a little before the constitutional treaty tried for ratification.
Switzerland is a confederation. Its 26 states have a lot of power, through the senate, state majority on national votes as well as sovereign areas like state taxes, education, state traffic. However, within boundaries, the Swiss national parliament can overrule state parliaments any day (and national people votes can overrule pretty much anything anyway).
Switzerland is a confederation in name and by tradition only, but has had all the features of a federation since 1848.
After civil war in 1847, the new constitution was drawn up expressly to create a federal central government to replace the weak old con-federate governments, and to have the cantons cede some of their sovereignty to it, in the same was the US Constitution had the states cede sovereignty in certain areas - the Swiss constitution of 1848 was to a large extent influenced by the US Constitution.
The current constitutions official name even translates to the Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation.
My bad, I always thought the definition of Confederation to be a more closer coupled federation, but it's the other way round. I think we were being taught the wrong way.
Don't forget about the European Council, the third power base in Europe, by far the strongest, and by far the least public. Could use some serious neutering too.
Of the three power bases, only the parliament is democratic, and it has almost no powers. I agree. The way we do politics in Europe, birthplace of democracy, is just sick.
Depends on the member country. Here in The Netherlands after an unfavorable referendum we just renamed the issue, put a new cover on it and pushed it through without a referendum two years later.
He didn't say he'd ignore court rulings. He told the trade committee (which isn't a court AFAIK) that advising against ACTA wouldn't stop the European court of justice from investigating its legality.
The alternative reading is that in the case either of the parliament or the ECJ rejects the current agreement, he will try to find a compromise that can get the approval of both.
While it is possible that he wants to try to weasel a procedural end-run around rejections, what he's actually said does not provide any basis for jumping to that conclusion.
Which looks like a soap opera at best and has no teeth as all the decisions are made at the commission and council level. It also has precious little by way of financial transparency or accountability to the public it claims to represent.
