European Digital Rights: Activist Guide to the Brussels Maze (2012)

“The purpose of this booklet is to provide activists with an insight into where EU legislative and non-legislative Proposals come from, what can be achieved at each stage of the administrative process. As the lifetime of any EU Proposal of any description is very long, it is important to know where to target any activity at any given moment. Every institution is very powerful and influential at certain moments and very much a spectator at other moments. We hope that this guide will help serve as a map of the Brussels maze.”

Written by Joe McNamee, Kirsten Fiedler, Marie Humeau
Publisher European Digital Rights (EDRi), Brussels, 23 January 2012
The EDRi Papers, Edition 01
Creative Commons 3.0 License
26 pages

commentary (Bits of Freedom) [Dutch]
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Vahida Ramujkic (ed.): Schengen with Ease (2006) [English, Serbian, Spanish]

‘Extra-comunitarios’, or citizens of non-European countries, have the ‘extra’ bureaucratic task of changing their status, to one that will allow them to move and work ‘freely’ within the European Union. The length and complexity of this process can vary depending on the type of ‘extra-comunitario’ in question. Almost everyone agrees that bureaucracy is the most boring thing on the world. Time spent in waiting rooms and lines is not considered as a part of living, but an interference, daily life put on hold, with the hope that, when it’s all over, it will be possible to take up ‘real’ life again as though nothing had ever happened. It is wasted, meaningless time that has to be erased as soon as the new status is achieved – in the case that process was successful.

“Schengen with ease” is a compilation of material from a variety of official and non-official sources, brought together to explain how daily practices are affected by the application of the EU Foreign Legislation and the Schengen Agreement in the territory of the European Union.

Adopting the Assimil method (Alphonse Chérel, Paris, 1929) this book provides a systematic study of all the bureaucratic steps a “non-EU” citizen might face while trying to obtain EU status. All the required steps are taught through lessons similar to those found in foreign language skill books, comparing the administrative language of European immigration legislation to an unknown language that has to be mastered in order to assimilate in a new environment and receive a determined status.

By organizing the structure of each lesson into Narration, Grammar and Exercise, different approaches to this legal-bureaucratic situation are given.While in Narrative one is exposed laic-experiential relation to the law, law as it is experienced by those who have to fulfill it (that recollects some 30 personal experiences that run through the book and could be followed in independent way), Grammar puts together the legal-normative approximation, law as it is written (information recollected from legal sources from different EU countries and administrative levels). Finally Exercise mix up of different bureaucratic forms that have to be completed, press cuttings, and parts of original documents…

Schengen sin esfuerzo / Schengen with ease
Beograd / Barcelona / Bruxelles, June 2006
ISBN: 0-9550664-8-4
365 pages

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EDRi: Shadow evaluation report on the Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC) (2011)

In advance of the European Commission the publication of its long overdue evaluation report on the Data Retention Directive, EDRi has published its own “shadow report”. This Directive currently requires long-term indiscriminate storage of records of every electronic communication of every person in the European Union. European Digital Rights (EDRi), concludes in a parallel ‘shadow report’ that European citizens have gained nothing from the Data Retention Directive, but lost their privacy. EDRi urges the Commission to respect the Charter on Fundamental Rights and reject data retention in Europe.

Nothing gained
In its evaluation report, the Commission fails to prove that data retention is a necessary instrument to fight serious crime. The statistics provided by Member States indicate that the vast majority of data used by law enforcement authorities would also have been available without obligatory data retention. The absence of data retention legislation in countries such as Germany and the Czech Republic (where national Constitutional Courts rejected transposition laws of the Data Retention Directive as an unjustified restriction on fundamental rights) has not led to an increase in crime or a decrease in the ability to fight crime.

Privacy lost
Meanwhile, 500 million European citizens have been confronted with an unprecedented and unnecessary infringement of their fundamental rights. In 2010, the average European had their traffic and location data logged in a telecommunications database once every six minutes. According to the European Data Protection Supervisor, the Directive constitutes ‘the most privacy invasive instrument ever adopted by the European Union’.
In addition, several Member States fail to fully respect the data security obligations of the Directive. Some do not even have a process for deleting the data after the retention periods, nor of overseeing this deletion. The Commission has accused unspecified Member States of breaches of legal process by exploiting domestic telecoms companies to obtain data from other EU Member States, thereby circumventing agreed legal procedures.
European citizens, and Europe’s hard won credibility for defending fundamental rights, have paid dearly for this Directive, both in terms of a reduction in the right to privacy and also in the chaotic and lawless treatment of personal data. The Commission report and our shadow report show that the Directive has failed on every level – it has failed to respect the fundamental rights of European citizens, it has failed to harmonise the European single market and it has failed as a necessary instrument to fight crime.”

What next?
The Commission’s evaluation report will serve as the basis for an impact assessment of policy options to annul or amend the Directive. EDRi will send its shadow report to the European Parliament, calling on its members to stand for the fundamental rights of 500 million EU citizens and repeal the Data Retention Directive.

Published by Digital Civil Rights in Europe on 17 April 2011

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