Like in Mexico, Parliaments Must Reject ACTA

Paris, June 23rd, 2011 – The Mexican Senate approved a resolution calling on the government not to sign the anti-counterfeiting agreement ACTA. La Quadrature calls on French and European Members of Parliament to do the same.

A few weeks after ACTA was opened to signature¹http://www.laquadrature.net/en/acta-ratification-underway-must-be-rejected, the resolution²http://www.senado.gob.mx/index.php?id=9376&lg=61&mn=2&sm=2&ver=sp of the Mexican Senate shows that it refuses the imposition of illegitimate sanctions in the fight against counterfeiting. Such a refusal is essential since ACTA – far from being limited to trade policy – would impose on signatories new sanctions that are ill-defined and extremely large in scope. These sanctions would apply even to not-for-profit infringements of copyright, patents or trademarks³See our analysis of ACTA, and in particular of the abusive definition of “commercial scale”: http://www.laquadrature.net/en/acta-updated-analysis-of-the-final-version. This vote suggests that even if the Mexican government were to sign ACTA, the Senate would refuse to ratify it.

“The vote of the Mexican Senate is a call to reason: you can’t negotiate in the back of democratic representatives in the sole interest of some lobbies’ outdated models. Let’s act so that in France and in the European Union as well, our elected representatives oppose the theft of their legislative competence. Citizens must call on parliamentarians to follow the example of their Mexican counterparts by demanding to national governments and the EU Commission to drop ACTA.”, says Jérémie Zimmermann, spokesperson for the citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net.