The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan has published a note on the signing of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement between the European Union and its Member States, Australia, Canada, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the United Mexican States, the Kingdom of Morocco, New Zealand, the Republic of Singapore, the Swiss Confederation and the United States of America (ACTA) by the European Union and its member states.
At the first signing ceremony, 1 October 2011, ACTA was signed by Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and the United States.
Yesterday, 26 January 2012, ACTA was signed for the EU (Council or Commission) and 22 of the 27 member states: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
In other words, Mexico and Switzerland have not signed yet. The EU member states which did not sign the agreement yesterday are expected to do so on the completion of respective domestic procedures. They are: Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands and Slovakia.
ACTA contents
The ACTA negotiations were conducted as a master class in undermining trust by and in governments and the European Union, but many of the public comments, for instance on Twitter #ACTA, give an impression that the contents of the agreement should be better known before being understood.
The proposal for a Council decision COM(2011) 380 exists in 22 official EU languages, with the agreement annexed. The English version is here.
INTA rapporteur and events
The ACTA rapporteur in the EP Committee on International Trade (INTA), Kader Arif, renounced his preparatory task as a protest move against the process (in French).
The Pirate MEP Christian Engström offers an orderly view of a chaotic situation. The text of the blog post is in Swedish, but the links lead to items in the original languages.
Ralf Grahn
P.S. Follow events on Bloggingportal.eu, the multilingual aggregator of euroblogs.
Friday 27 January 2012
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How can I find out who in person did put the signature for each country. I.e. the signed ACTA document must be somewhere? I need to know this to find out if the signer for each country is competent to sign that or if that person just put a signature on some paper not knowing on what.
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