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Comment by waps | Hacker News Reader

EU citizens ? Why do they matter ?

The EU fought hard to get two legal precedents :

1) that international treaties preceed the constitutions of member states (and any and all other laws).

2) that the European Commission would be allowed to agree to international treaties on behalf of member states.

There is nobody that can stop this that isn't already in power and Volcker can push this through without ratification by any kind of elected body. Stopping it can only be done in the United States, where it actually has to pass parliament ("congress").

At least now we know why there is no "democratic" in the "European Union" name.

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A fundamental critique stems from the following effects of the policy:

Companies would be able to demand compensation from countries whose health, financial, environmental and other public interest policies they thought to be undermining their interests, and take governments before extrajudicial tribunals. These tribunals, organised under World Bank and UN rules would have the power to order taxpayers to pay extensive compensation over legislation seen as undermining a company’s “expected future profits”.

taken from: http://mondediplo.com/2013/12/02tafta . From my understanding this is basically an incentive for national governments to make their (consumer) laws as accordant with each other as possible. One problem I see with this implementation is that this will result in an accordance (of national laws) on the lowest common denominator, ie. the weakest form of consumer protection. In this specific case this would mostly mean levels of consumer protection as seen in the USA and this is in my opinion not in the interest of the general consumer (but that's a discussion of its own).

I beg to differ : as far as I know, the European Commission has been granted a mandate to negociate, but the European Parlement (which represents the EU citizens, however badly/poorly elected it is) will have to ratify it ; then depending on the exact content of the treaty, national parlements might have to ratify it, too.

Which does not change the fact that the current way the treaty is negociated is probably too secret.

You seem to lack a basic understanding of the EU, or democracy in general. Volcker can't "push TTIP through without ratification by any kind of elected body". The elected government, eu parliament, in many cases national parliaments will have a strong voice in ratification.

This process isn't undemocratic in the least. It's just that the decisions are complex. I'm not strongly in favour of TTIP in its current form, but the more I know about it, the less I believe all the fear mongering.

There seems to be a gut reflex of "I don't understand it, so it must be undemocratic!!"

Then a democratic entity has the duty to explain and clarify it to its voters. I am seeing next to nothing of that.

Actually it doesn't. With negotiations that's especially murky, because they are extremely complex and can contain proposals which don't have a chance to go into the agreement.

Explanation/Clarification is not something a voter is entitled to. He can demand it, and usually the media is giving it to him, if at all.

There is also a very good disincentives for politicians to explain "too much". Essentially, when talking to an audience of millions of people, everything you say can be used against you in a court of public opinion. Everything can and will be understood wrongly. That is also partly why effective politicians aren't particularly eager to "tell the truth".

Sure, it can be pushed through, as could have previous tech-related secret bills. However, they weren't, because so many people and organisations took up arms and fought against it.

Just because something might not be a democratic process doesn't mean we can't fight against it and book a win against it.

This "process" can't be democratic or undemocratic. The only question can be how far the decision making process is removed from the public.

I can understand the rationale for keeping the negotiations largely secret. This is a very big negotiation, and in general, all sorts of demands or proposals are put on the table in the beginning. Many of these proposals have no chance of getting ratified, but they would still be lethal ammunition for any EU-hating party.

(Germany only, don't know about other states)

1) The national constition is the highest part of the German law, not EU law. The courts cooperate in many ways and co-exist, but EU law is not above the Constition / Grundgesetz. (See for example http://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/lexika/177026/grundgesetz-und...)

2) The TTIP has to be ratified by the member states. (See for example http://www.bmwi.de/DE/Service/suche,did=630990.html)

> At least now we know why there is no "democratic" in the "European Union" name.

Because any country with "Democratic" in the name is usually a totalitarian undemocratic communist dictatorship? :P

TTIP would still have to pass the directly elected EP. Juncker, the new head of the commission was also nominated due to his fraction winning the most seats in parliament.

Some more discussion about this :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_deficit_in_the_Europ...

And yes it passes the parliament, however

1) treaties can be adopted without a parliamentary "yes" (has happened many times in the past, because it didn't even used to be asked at all)

2) parliament can say yes or no, but cannot change anything.

3) looking at the contents of previous treaties, it is blatantly obvious that the rules introduced using this instrument would never have passed parliament using other means.

An example of this would be, well, and example of this would be TTIP itself, if the contents are what they're rumored to be, which seems like. Other examples include, for example, the copyright directive [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Directive

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