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Comment by yannickmahe | Hacker News Reader

One of the benefits of being in the EU is that there is a higher authority than the government who can overturn stuff like that. I'm not a legal expert, but seeing as how the latest constitutionnal questions in France went, I'm pretty sure this decree will not stand.

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I'm not sure what basis the EU would have to strike this down though?

privacy?

IANAL, but if I were I'd argue that this law doesn't comply with article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights[0]. There is room for exception in that article (e.g. for national security), but that doesn't take away the fundamental right of privacy. If this were to come before a court, the judge would try to balance the two rights (right to privacy and the right to be safe from child molesters or what not) to determine which of them should prevail in this situation. An important consideration is the fact that the aim of the government can mostly be achieved in a more practical way in this case (i.e. allowing them access to the data, without giving them a password), so I think that this law stands a good chance to be shot down.

A good example of a case involving privacy and the margin of appreciation of a national lawmaker is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_and_Marper_v_United_Kingdom

P.S. To explain the legal situation to Americans: international conventions and particularly the European laws (like the aforementioned ECHR, which has a special court that accepts cases from a national level that want to appeal on the basis of the ECHR) are more important than national laws. It is a bit like the Constitution in the United States.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conve...

Of course the question arises: who will overturn the "overturner"?

The EU's ability to intervene into local politics is not as direct as you think. Every EU law needs to be signed by individual countries before it's valid in there. Only after the law is signed and the countries break it, can they be held accountable by the EU. So if the EU was to act, it would have to pass a law (which will go in effect in a few years), then get France to sign it, and later sue them.

Presumably you're excluding higher courts such as the ECHR? Not that I think the vastly expanded role the ECHR currently fulfils is a good thing (it handles orders of magnitude more cases than it ought).

This isn't entirely correct. The basic idea that countries are only bound by treaties they agreed to (or laws that flow from those treaties, e.g. if they give the EU parliament legislative power in some areas) is right. However, some laws might be in breach of existing treaties (like the ECHR) that the countries previously signed. That might very well be the case i.c. If so, the (part of the) law that is in breach is void until the treaty is changed (which is unlikely in most cases).

I can also see some disadvantages to ceding your sovereignty to a not-entirely-democratic supranational bureaucracy.

Hopefully it all works out for Europe but I hope to God my country never goes down that route.

The supranational bureaucracy is put in place by some mostly-democratic nation states.

It's not like you can vote for judges on the supreme court in America directly, either.

But that's just another government. What makes Brussels more likely to get it right than Paris?

In short, the EU is deeply boring. This means its various machinations are covered less by the various national newspapers, leaving them to make decisions in peace.

When I say "covered less" I mean in the hysterical, think-of-the-children way that national politics tends to be reported. It is still obviously covered.

It's really comical how the tone changes between news segments about national legislation and EU legislation. That's at least my experience in Germany.

Not that this additional way of making laws isn't a double edged sword. A common European market is in my view a great idea and it is very clear that laws are necessary to implement such a market, treaties alone won't do. But there is always the danger that the EU tries to do too much or that battles against bad legislation have to be fought again and again.

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