Lip service to democracy

The European Council Presidency has declared as adopted the agreement concerning software patents of 18 May 2004, which effectively grants unlimited patentability for software, as an A-item in an unrelated meeting. This is despite three previous equally shady attempts at passing it as an A-item in equally unrelated meetings having been foiled, despite requests of several states to move it to a B-item which would reopen negotiations, despite the lack of a qualified majority of member states, and despite the violation of procedural rules.

Jonas Maebe, FFII Board Member, comments:

It is absolutely unfathomable what happened today. I cannot see how the promoters of the European Constitution can still support it with a straight face. This event shows that something is clearly rotten in the city of Brussels at the Council building. Why on Earth do we still have the rules that state that national parliaments should be taken into account by the Council?

Things would be much easier if we scrapped all those rules and simply wrote down “The Council presidency and Commission can do together whatever they like.” There’s no need for those pesky democratically elected parliamentarians to interfere with the smooth decision making process of the Council, since its only goal appears to be to please big business and to produce as many texts as the sausage machine can bear.

This is absolutely disgusting.

There is nothing I need to add.