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Comment by paol | Hacker News Reader

Sadly the parliament is essentially a powerless organ by design. The problem is that the european commission accumulates both executive power and most of the legislative power, where the later should lie with parliament.

The end result is that the parliament is basically a farcical attempt to give the appearance of democratic legitimacy to the EU legislative process, but the farce is transparent enough that it just ends up tainting the public perception of the EU institutions.

There are political reasons for this arrangement of course, but I don't want to turn this into (more of) a rant. [EDIT: I end up going into that in this other post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4161285]

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The Parliament is not so impotent since the new codecision rules under the Lisbon Treaty and has been happy to flex its new-found muscles. Moreover, if the responses to my letter to my MEPs on this subject are at all indicative, most or all of the major political groups in Brussels are outright hostile to ACTA at this point.

I suspect De Gucht may have overestimated his influence here. He has also perhaps forgotten that his term of office is not so long and that the European Parliament could even hold up the appointment of the next Commission if it wanted to make a point about abuse of authority. (It did hold up the first Barroso commission in 2004, forcing a reshuffle of which commissioner was given which portfolio, so this is certainly not an idle threat for the Parliament to make, either.)

Seriously, how flawed is the design of the EU's political institutions?

- No constitution right from the beginning.

- Executive can overrule legislative (and even judicative?)

- Legislative can hold up executive meetings (??)

- The EU is a international treaty whose signatories are sovereign nations. They can't really have a constitution in the same role as a nation state.

- No, commission can't overrule the EP. The parliament can reject commission-proposed legislation, and it can fire the commission.

edit: see the parliament doing its thing against ACTA here: http://www.rt.com/news/acta-committee-final-vote-365/

The EP can impeach the Commission - unfortunately only the whole Commission rather than an individual Commissioner.

Sounds like it's time for them to do just that - if this sort of open contempt for the democratic process and the rule of law doesn't qualify as adequate grounds, nothing does.

What's the best channel by which to call for that action?

This is just sophistry now. The commissioner is playing the role he's supposed to play in the EU institutions, and I have seen no indication that he's done anything illegal or held the parliament in contempt.

> I have seen no indication that he's done anything illegal or held the parliament in contempt

He's said he will ignore the decisons arrived at by the democratically elected representatives of the people. That seems a pretty clear indication to me.

What the parent commenter is saying is that he is technically acting within the legal bounds of his office. That is, impeachment will be impossible unless an actual violation of law is found.

> That is, impeachment will be impossible unless an actual violation of law is found.

The European parliament can't impreach the commission. What it can do is sack them (but all of them, not just one). No evidence of illegality is needed.

No, he's said he will continue to seek the legal advice of the ECJ regardless of whether or not parliament agrees with the current solution, so that depending on the decisions by the ECJ and the decision by parliament, they can look at how to address issues to make it possible for parliament to agree to a revised proposal.

Nothing in what he said indicates he wants to try to overrule the parliament, only that the EU executive branch believes ACTA is important, and so if the current solution is not approved by parliament they want all the information they can on how to make it acceptable.

We might not like that he's likely to try to go back for a second try with what will likely be relatively unsubstantial changes, but it is not unusual for proposals to be revised and revisited.

He said he'll ignore what citizens of EU, and their elected representatives want, because according to law he technically can.

I have no problem with abusing the law to get rid of him ASAP.

That's unfortunate but, put them all on the street. Maybe the next group will make sure no single member does something this idiotic and gets them all fired for it.

The European Parliament has been getting more power with every treaty change.

So the EP is the one that's accumulating power (which is right, but hasn't gone far enough yet)

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