Eurobloat #0048 • April 2014
April 2014 was the month the European Union legislated your roaming bill, your cigarettes, your carrier bags and your bank account, then watched its own judges declare that the mass surveillance it had ordered up was illegal all along.
Folly of the Month: The EU built a continental surveillance machine, and its own court switched it off
On 8 April the Court of Justice declared the Data Retention Directive invalid, the very directive the EU had spent years forcing every member state to implement. For the better part of a decade Brussels had compelled telephone companies and internet providers to log who you called, when, for how long and from where, then handed the keys to officials. The Grand Chamber found the scheme so disproportionate, so devoid of safeguards and so indiscriminate that it breached the Charter of Fundamental Rights, retroactively, from the day it took effect. A useful reminder that when the EU assures you it is protecting your rights, it is often the EU you need protecting from.
→ curia.europa.eu → eur-lex.europa.eu
1. Your mobile bill, now a matter for 28 governments
On 3 April Parliament voted by 534 to 25 to abolish roaming charges and enshrine net neutrality, a measure marketed as a borderless paradise for the consumer. The catch, as ever, is that a single market for telecoms means a single rulebook written in Brussels, with the price of your phone call decided by people you cannot vote out.
2. The Tobacco Directive: Brussels lights up the nanny state
Also on 3 April the EU adopted its revised Tobacco Products Directive, mandating outsized health warnings, banning menthol cigarettes and dragging e-cigarettes, a product that helps people quit, into the regulatory net. Twenty-eight nations were told precisely how a packet of cigarettes must look, because clearly the great questions of the age are matters of typeface and flavour.
3. The carrier bag crusade
At the April plenary, more than eighty per cent of MEPs backed binding targets to cut lightweight plastic bag use by half within three years and eighty per cent within five, complete with mandatory charging. A whole transnational legislature, summoned into being to keep the peace in Europe, now devotes its energies to the contents of your shopping trolley.
4. The Single Resolution Mechanism: bank failures, centralised
On 15 April Parliament approved the Single Resolution Mechanism, shifting the power to wind up failing banks from national capitals to a new board and fund in the eurozone. Another lever quietly relocated from democratically accountable governments to the machinery of "more Europe", sold as the only conceivable answer to a crisis the same machinery helped engineer.
5. A basic bank account, by order of Brussels
On 15 April MEPs voted by 603 to 21 to grant everyone legally resident in the EU the right to a basic payment account, with rules on fees and switching dictated from the centre. The retail banking arrangements of half a billion people, now a competence of the European Parliament, because no corner of ordinary life is too small to be harmonised.
6. Criminal law, the way Brussels likes it
On 16 April the EU adopted a directive setting minimum criminal sanctions for market abuse, instructing member states what conduct to criminalise and how many years in prison to hand down. The power to define crimes and punishments, once the bedrock of national sovereignty, is now another item on the harmonisation conveyor belt.
7. When the court rules against you, relabel the words
Parliament backed rules so that honey containing genetically modified pollen need not be labelled as such, by redefining pollen from an "ingredient" into a mere "constituent". A neat trick: the Court of Justice had said in 2011 that such honey should be labelled, so the legislature simply changed the dictionary until the inconvenient ruling evaporated.
→ beuc.eu
8. The Clinical Trials Regulation: one database to rule them all
On 2 April Parliament adopted the Clinical Trials Regulation by 594 to 17, replacing national procedures with an EU-wide authorisation system and a central database run from Brussels. Presented as a triumph of transparency, it is also one more research process pulled out of member states and into the gravitational field of the Commission.
9. Confiscation, harmonised across the continent
On 3 April the EU adopted a directive on the freezing and confiscation of the proceeds of crime, laying down common rules for seizing assets, including extended and non-conviction-based confiscation. Worthy aims, no doubt, yet handing Brussels the template for taking property from citizens is precisely the sort of power best left under the close eye of national parliaments and national courts.
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