EU and Democracy

EU and Democracy

Posted May 10, 2004 10:47 UTC (Mon) by Felix.Braun (subscriber, #3032)
In reply to: U'm from the EU(Estonia) and AFIK... by XERC
Parent article: FFII: EU Ambassadors vote to back Software Patents

governments have almost nothing to do with it, since the dicision will be taken by a council of ministers at the given field

I'm sorry but this statement makes no sense. The Council of Ministers -- as it's name implies -- is composed of the member State's competent ministers. Hence, the Council represents national governments which are all democratically elected and subject to democratic review by their national parliaments.

Of course, it is true that representatives of the executive branch of government usually don't have that much of a say in the legislative process. This is why it is said that the EU has a deficiency of democracy. The democratic scrutiny is weakend by one more level of indirection.

However, this does not apply to the present case, where the Council of Ministers and the EU Pariliament have to co-operate in the legislative process. Even if the -- democratically elected -- ministers should vote to back software patentability, the EU Parliament would get another chance to oppose this bill in it's second reading, albeit with stricter requirements of majority.

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