I am fucking scared of the mass surveilence nightmare direction that the internet and the world as a whole is going towards… C2PA, france hacking itself into citizen phones, the UK anti encryption law, EU’s chat control, etc. Im also sick of and hate the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality that corpos try to push. I dont wanna know how the world will look like in 5-10 years.
EU policy is so hit and miss because the EU Parliament mostly has our backs, and is introducing good legislation protecting consumers of corpo overreach (like the roaming directive). The EU Commission on the other hand has only the interest of the EU countries’ governments in mind, which makes many of its proposals rather shitty of the common citizen. Also tells you a lot about what the actual national governments stand for, when somebody else is doing more for the citizens than they are.
thank you for that brief explanation, didn’t really know the difference between the two branches(is that what they call em?)
That explanation doesn’t really go into any detail.
The EU Parliament is made up of elected MEPs from each member state (EU countries). They vote on EU citizens’ behalf for the regulations that the EU imposes. Typically, these regulations are basically the EU saying “member states need to make a law about this within these confines” and then it’s up to each member state to flesh out their own version of the law internally.
The European Commission is made up of lawyers. They are not elected, instead they are selected by the government of each member state. The EC lawyers write the rules that the EU Parliement MEPs vote on. The idea being, you want talented professionals in this role, rather than someone who is merely popular - they need to write robust rules that can withstand challenge and suit the entire EU. However it depends on member state governments correctly selecting for this position.
People knowledgeable in law write the laws, then democratically elected representatives vote on them.
So I don’t think /u/Queztacoatl@feddit.de really had it right in their statement of how it functions. The EU Parliament doesn’t introduce any laws, the EC writes directives that the EU Parliament vote into force, then member states write laws within the bounds of the directives.
However they may be right that members of the EC can be more politically motivated, given that they are appointed to their position by the government of their home country, rather than by the people of their home country.
That’s a more detailed explanation thanks. The OP explanation was helpful for someone who hasn’t really looked into how it functions.
Is there some sort of judiciary at the EU level or is the robustness of laws tested in national contexts?
There are definitely EU courts, one of the reasons the UK left was to get out from under the EU courts. All member states have to implement laws that fit within the EU directives, if these laws don’t match or aren’t enforced then a citizen may end up escalating their claim to the EU courts, after exhausting their national courts. The nation then has to follow the EU court’s ruling.
Saying that I can’t think of any example where the EU court didn’t bring forward a fair ruling that the UK had to adhere to. There certainly was plenty of shit stirred up by the government about it, but when you looked into the claims they fell flat.