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Comment by buffington | Hacker News Reader

Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious, but what does "unconstitutional" mean?

If it means "violates United States of America's constitution", why would European law makers care?

The HN title is editorialised, the article itself makes a reasonable case that the regulations are not “compatible with the rights of privacy and data protection under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights”

The obvious thing you are missing is that many Europeans refer to the collection of EU treaties as a whole as a "constitution" and that most EU member states themselves have written constitutions, so there are many ways in which a proposed EU-level law could properly be said to be "unconstitutional".

There was a proposed constitution, but it was rejected by referenda in both The Netherlands and France. As the constitution was not ratified, talking about constitutional makes very little sense.

To be fair though, the Lisbon treaty contains the vast majority of what would have been the constitution, just in a much less nice form.

In a very real sense, one of the requirements for being a country is for an entity to actually claim or declare that it is one, so that it can be recognised as one.

So by acceding to "The Treaty of Lisbon" rather than "The Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe", the member states were legally disclaiming the right for the EU to be considered a federation or confederation.

(However, the Treaty of Lisbon did introduce a distinct legal personhood for the EU, which is arguably another necessary condition for a declaration of statehood).

What EU country are you from where someone would be confused by another saying a proposed EU law is "unconstitutional" in the native language?

Per the first line from the "Treaties of the European Union" wikipedia article:

  The Treaties of the European Union are a set of international treaties between the European Union (EU) member states which sets out the EU's constitutional basis.

This phrasing sounds totally normal to me in English and its Portuguese equivalent.

Yes, the term "[un]constitutional" can be used in this way. You don't have to have a written constitution to be able to discuss constitutionality. The UK has no written constitution but we have experts in constitutional law.

The problem with the title is that it is heavily editorialised. Not only does the article not use the term "unconstitutional", it doesn't even firmly conclude that the proposed law is contrary to the EU treaties. It outlines an argument to that effect and ends by stating further steps needed to make a strong case.

The article itself has a perfectly good title: "Does monitoring your phone affect the essence of privacy?"

> The obvious thing you are missing is that many Europeans refer to the collection of EU treaties as a whole as a "constitution"

I have never heard anyone use that term to refer to European laws or directives.

The word constitution does not exclusively refer to the document titled Constitution of the United States of 1787.

It means it's been submitted with a ridiculous title that doesn't match the article. It needs to be changed to "Does monitoring your phone affect the essence of privacy?"

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