This article is also available in:
Deutsch: Europäisches Parlament: Aktueller Stand bei ACTA

After long, opaque and undemocratic negotiations, the Anti-Counterfeiting Agreement (ACTA) is making its first steps into the European Parliament.

The long process of the ratification of ACTA, which will need to overcome the hurdles created by votes in all 27 EU national parliaments as well as in the European Parliament, has now started.

The first step in the process at a European level, after a rubber-stamping of the text by the Council, is that each of the European Parliament Committees that considers it has an important perspective to add to the process will nominate itself to provide an "opinion" on the text.

Currently, two committees - Legal Affairs and Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs have decided to give opinions. In the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI), Marielle Gallo (EPP) is in charge of the dossier. On 17 October, the Civil liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE) decided to produce an opinion, but it has not yet been decided which MEP will be in charge.

The committee that will produce the final report to be approved by the whole parliament (theoretically taking due account of the "opinions" of the other committees) is the International Trade Committee (INTA), with Kader Arif (S&D Group, France) as Rapporteur.

Having fought hard throughout its entire history for the right to have equal decision-making power on dossiers such as this one, the Parliament now appears almost afraid to take an independent, democratic decision. MEPs appear worried that rejecting the decision might look childish or, more bizarrely, rude, after all of the work that has been put into the Agreement up until now.

Every European policy maker needs to be encouraged to consider the implications of ACTA. For this reason, EDRi, Access and the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) worked together to produce a booklet, which provides an insight into the controversial and unacceptable parts of the proposal.

The booklet outlines the lack of credibility, the threat to freedom of expression and access to culture; the dangers threatening privacy, and the chilling effect on innovation and the hindrance to trade that will be created if ACTA is adopted. All members of the European Parliament received the booklet last week.

A translation of the booklet is available in German, Polish and Czech. Other languages (such as Romanian and French) will be added in due course and will be included on the web version of this article and announced via Twitter.

EDRi Booklet on ACTA
http://www.edri.org/files/acta-bklt-p2s.pdf

Czech version
http://www.slidilove.cz/sites/default/files/acta-argumenty_cz.pdf

German version
http://www.edri.org/files/acta-edri-broschuere.pdf

Polish version
http://www.edri.org/files/ACTA_booklet_PL.pdf

EDRi-gram: ENDitorial: Countries start signing ACTA, preparatory docs still secret (5.10.2011)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number9.19/acta-documents-secret

(Contribution by Marie Humeau - EDRi)