[Chapter-delegates] Dutch parliament freezes signing ACTA

[Marcin Cieslak]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2012, Michiel Leenaars wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> good news from our side of the planet. As you may have seen Dutch
> parliament has voted against ratifying ACTA for now yesterday.

here's what I got from Ante Wessels of FFII:

From: Ante <ante at ffii.org>
To: Marcin Cieslak <saper at saper.info>
Cc: a2k at lists.keionline.org
Subject: Re: [A2k] Dutch Parliament asks government not to sign ACTA

On Wednesday 15 February 2012 10:39:17 Marcin Cieslak wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Feb 2012, Ante wrote:
> > Dutch Parliament asks government not to sign ACTA
> > http://acta.ffii.org/?p=1169
> > with link
> 
> How binding is this?
> 
> We've had two similar resolutions of parliamentary commissions
> here in Poland just before the signature and it didn't help.

The parliament (plenary) "asks" the minister, this is not binding. 

It does put pressure on the minister. Normally, the groups supporting the 
government, vote for government proposals. 

We have a special situation in NL at the moment, a minority government. They 
normally do have a majority, since one parliamentary group supports the 
government (while not having any minister). This group, the PVV, yesterday 
voted for the resolution. 

The minister may decide to sign ACTA regardless of the adopted resolution. But 
then the parliament may more easily decide to not ratify ACTA. The minister 
can not blame the parliament, and especially the PVV, to be disloyal, since 
then he was disloyal to parliament himself when he signed ACTA. 

vriendelijke groet,
cordialmente,

Ante

//forwarded by Marcin