Rumors about the EU Telecoms Package

Reports in international media suggest that the European Parliament have backed down from the famous amendment 138 to the EU Telecoms Package. (The one demanding prior ruling by a court of law if any member state starts disconnecting people from the internet.)

This is not my picture of what is going on. Yes, the EP delegation to the Conciliation Committé on the EU Telecoms package did support a rather messy compromise text on its´ last meeting. It included "prior", but was vague on what kind of judicial instance to use and had other elements that where both promising and sneaky.

(The Swedish Pirate Party, the Greens and the leftist group did not clear this text. First of all, we did not get it in writing and where supposed to decide upon it after a oral review. This is not a serious way of law making. We are also suspicious when it comes to several elements in the text. So we have stated that we expect the delegation to uphold the essence of 138.)

And, as we suspected, this text crashed and burned in the Trialogue meeting with the leaders of the EP delegation and the Council. (E.g. did the Council take "prior" away and at the same time it suggested more reasons for suspending people from the net.) I find this very hard for the EP delegation to swallow.

Now, we are waiting for the Council to elaborate on the preliminary compromise text from the Trialogue, above. But we know that there have been disagreement on this in Coreper (the body that prepares dosiers for the European Council).

But there is, as you can se, no agreement on anything at the moment.

The Council do not accept the EP proposal. The EP delegation will not be able to accept the preliminary Council proposal. There is disagreement in Coreper. And in the EP the Pirates, the Greens and the left sticks to 138 for as long as possible. At least until we get something that is better.

This means that it is far to early to say anything about anything. If something at all have changed, I would say that the level of disagreement has rised.

Wednesday next week the EP delegation will meet again in the afternoon. And in the evening there will be a full Conciliation Committé meeting (EP and Council). This is the first CC meeting. And until then, we have nothing like an agreement. No common ground. And I doubt that we will afterwards.

This far, all we have is disagreement betwen the institutions, in the Council and in the EP delegation.

But it is quite clar that someone is trying to spin this. In a press release the Swedish EU Presidency, earlier this week, described the talks as "open and creative"...

[In Swedish]