Council of Ministers

Council of Ministers

Posted Oct 21, 2003 12:20 UTC (Tue) by j_heald (guest, #15398)
In reply to: Time for another Europatent push by dmantione
Parent article: Time for another Europatent push

However, the free software community has educated the europarlement about the dangers, and the europarlement has clearly spoken. I expect they won't change their mind soon. It looks pretty hard now that the swpat lobby can fullfill all their wishes.

The EU Council of Ministers pretty much has *contempt* for the Parliament. The ministers see it as *their* job to govern, as representatives of national governments -- with the Parliament just a basically unnecessary irrelevant source of hot air.

What we 'won' was a first reading debate in the Parliament. The debate which comes next is a second reading debate, based on whatever text comes out of the ministers' meeting on November 10th, with different voting rules that make it far harder for MEPs to pass amendments.

As the LWN summary says: "The European Parliament's rules for second reading make it very difficult for MEPs to fix a bad text from the Council".

That is why we to do everything we can *now* to get national MPs and national governments to fix the Council text -- before it is too late.

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