5 ms·

Very strange stuff, considering that ECHR has ruled against this sort of thing. I don't see how it could possibly be legal.

candiodari 3y ago
Have you not yet notice that essentially all EU regulations have blanket exceptions for anything done by states. EU states, including the EU itself, have blanket exceptions to the GPDR, for example. For example, they get to pass around private medical data, without telling anyone, supposedly in cases where they deem it to be important for investigations (not just criminal), anything to do with protection of minors, ... And because nobody cooperates well with this "for some reason", you find more than a few examples of them passing around (and using in court) WRONG private medical data. There has never been any conviction for this (DESPITE EU countries getting convicted for basing judgements on wrong medical data in their own EU courts). I imagine something similar is going on here.
- xvector 3y ago
  Most EU tech regs are designed to rent seek from big tech under the guise of privacy or consumer rights. They never actually apply the laws locally, or they carve out exceptions. Take the DMA and Spotify, or the AI Act and Mistral, etc. The blind cheering of EU regs is kinda wild to me. The worst tech regulation I've seen is out of the EU, from trying to destroy PKI and E2EE, or trying to break the transformer model, or a thousand other braindead initiatives.
  - Tainnor 3y ago
    > They never actually apply the laws locally, or they carve out exceptions. This is incorrect: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
  - vasco 3y ago
    I'm in europe and I agree to a certain extent. There are also european representatives that genuinely push for privacy, but I consider the GDPR a joke in its implementation by each local countries institutions, which everyone turns a blind eye toward, unless that local institution can use the GDPR as an excuse to not do something, which they take whenever they can. And then the EU turns around and uses the same regulations to go after Meta or Google Analytics. I'm way more worried that public employees in random government entities can look me up willy nilly than Facebook knowing I bought a pencil on Amazon.
    - hcfman 3y ago
      Everything they do is a joke. They also passed into law net neutrality. But you can't see anything that indicates that this is actually a law. And let's not talk about cookies.
  - snowpid 3y ago
    Could you explain the DMA and Spotify? This does not make sense.
    - xvector 3y ago
      Spotify is a market maker as per the spirit of the DMA (ask any artist), but they are conveniently excluded from the DMA. The requirements of the DMA are gerrymandered to leave a curious hole in the place where Spotify would be. Mistral noted the AI Act was regulating the transformer model itself, and that the regulations were technically unsustainable and frankly incompetent[1]. The AI Act ended up carving out an exception for Mistral specifically, leaving the technically untenable system in place for American big tech. [1]: https://twitter.com/arthurmensch/status/1725076260827566562?s=20 https://twitter.com/arthurmensch/status/1725076260827566562?...
      - snowpid 3y ago
        " Spotify is a market maker as per the spirit of the DMA (ask any artist), but they are conveniently excluded from the DMA. The requirements of the DMA are gerrymandered to leave a curious hole in the place where Spotify would be. " Could you be more precise how to be market maker? Ask any artist is not a valid explaination. " The AI Act ended up carving out an exception for Mistral specifically, " Though I didnt ask for it please tell us more for the Mistral specific exception. And why it is bad to regulate American tech?
  - amarcheschi 3y ago
    The part about applying laws locally is wrong. Here you can find a list of gdpr related fines throughout all europe: https://gdpr-fines.inplp.com/list/ https://gdpr-fines.inplp.com/list/ (There might be other gdpr fines trackers) As you can see, fines vary from small amounts to huge amounts, depending on the violations and the size of the company. in the first page some organizations are fined as small as 150€ and as big as 18.400.000£, the latter at page 13, involving Marriott international
- logicchains 3y ago
  >Have you not yet notice that essentially all EU regulations have blanket exceptions for anything done by states. It's the China model; the constitution guarantees a bunch of rights but then gives the party the right to override those rights any time it seems necessary. Which is completely unsurprising; what bureaucrat is going to write a law that limits their own power?
  - vasco 3y ago
    A good one, there's many examples of laws limiting government power. Most constitutions usually include some provision to this effect.
  - Tainnor 3y ago
    Courts are regularly imposing limits on what individual parties (notice the plural!) can do, what are you talking about?
    - candiodari 3y ago
      Kind of true, in the worst possible way. The ECHR for example regularly imposes limits on what states can do. Tiny issue when it comes to the EU: their judgements aren't enforced against states, and states just flat out refuse to enforce them. It, for example, ruled that Belgium can't keep imprisoning Freddy Horion, a murderer (who murdered when he was 24, he's now 75). He is still in prison, 10 years after the conviction of the Belgian state, who seem to be keeping him in prison mostly because he refuses to confess (and testify against a suspected accomplice), apparently for over 21 years now that is the reason he's in prison (and he hasn't received one cent of the money the Belgian state was convicted to pay him, since it was a penalty per day doubtless it is millions of euros now). Plus he's 75 ... Additionally he's been denied medical care at least twice. There's another Belgian prisoner, Farid Bamouhammad, who has been tortured in prison (hung up with cuffs by his throat to the heating system and left like that for more than 24 hours). The story has a horrific ending: he was denied medical care for 3 years. He ... has since died from the cancer (treatable at the beginning of those 3 years he was denied medical care by the justice system) he turned out to have. He was not paid damages either. There's more horror in this case. AND there's a general conviction of the Belgian justice system, on 2 separate aspects. Nothing has changed. Damages have not been paid. For the general convictions the damages, a small per-day per-prisoner amount, ignored by the state for a decade, are now absolutely ridiculous amounts that will never be paid. To give another example, ECHR ruled that the Danish MUST NOT allow child services to act in situations where parents cannot provide appropriate housing for children. Instead, it must use other institutions to provide housing to those families. Inappropriate housing is the number one reason children are placed out of their home, before ... and after the ruling. Obviously, once again, a few specific parents and children were to receive damages, they haven't received a cent. (this is especially ironic, since it'scourts going EXPLICITLY against a superior court, the ECHR, just because the executive requests them too. This is against the separation of powers and violates the very concept of a judicial system ... and the violators ... are judges) A Dutch general was convicted of war crimes during the Yugoslav war, and a bunch of people were promised payment for his crimes. He has not been punished, not even fined, and has since received the medal of Honor from the Dutch Royals. The money the Dutch state was convicted to pay has not been paid. Not a cent. Germany was convicted to be in the wrong to arrest 2 people who had crossed into Germany at the request of the Dutch state (they were -alleged- shoplifters, and they are innocent, in the sense that they were never convicted), and hand them over to the Dutch police. This failed to respect a long list of legal rights EU citizens supposedly have. Switzerland has been convicted of wrongfully convicting ... France has been convicted of holding prisoners in inhumane conditions (and we don't mean "a few", but 60% of all judicial prisoners) ... Now don't take this the wrong way. When ECHR convicts INDIVIDUALS (or companies) there is more enforcement. But against states ... states just ignore, nothing happens. Yes, there are cases of states actually paying, but looking up which ones they are (e.g. Turkey. One might remark ... Turkey ISN'T in the EU) makes this even worse. At least, everybody just sort of shuts up about these, as opposed to Hamas complaining Israel "is convicted of genocide by ICC" (which is a double lie: Israel isn't convicted, yet they, Palestine, ARE convicted, and ARE persisting in the crimes they are convicted of, no this isn't about the hostages, it's about earlier stuff). And they're screaming this everywhere. Now, I understand why they do it, but it remains utterly distasteful to lie like that.
- impossiblefork 3y ago
  Yes, but the ECHR does not.
littlestymaar 3y ago
EC isn't bound by ECHR, which isn't an instance of the European Union but one of the Council of Europe (not to be confused with European Council, which itself is a EU institution). The European Convention on Human Rights is an international convention, and EU is in fact supposed to adhere it eventually : its adhesion is planned in the Treaty of Lisbon but the process is kind of stuck because the CJEU (which is the justice court of the EU) ruled against the previous attempt. Until then, the European Commission isn't bound by a decision from ECHR. (Though the same arguments that were brought in front of the ECHR could be brought in front of the CJEU so that it rules against it, but it would rule on the basis of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU this time and not on the basis of the European Convention on Human Rights). Yes, European Union is kind of complicated, and the confusing naming make things even worse. Edit: fix the acronym of the Court of Justice of the EU, I mixed up the order of the letters in the English version.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  >EC isn't bound by ECHR, which isn't an instance of the European Union but one of the Council of Europe (not to be confused with European Council, which itself is a EU institution). Also not to be confused with Council of the European Union, often referred to in EU documents simply as "the Council", which is separate from those two still.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    I didn't want to put too much unrelated stuff in my post, but yeah, these three things have basically the same name yet are entirely different. Who thought it was a good idea?!
- impossiblefork 3y ago
  All the EU members are also members of the CoE and are bound by these things, so the commission is in fact bound by the ECHR. There is no way to implement any directive that goes against the ECHR.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
thefz 3y ago
Never going to go anywhere.
Tainnor 3y ago
Not that strange, unfortunately. Governments have a habit of passing laws (or budgets) that are then eventually declared unconstitutional by courts. We've had several cases of this happening in Germany in recent years (budgets, rent control laws, highway tolls, ...). At least in some cases, this could be a calculated move, e.g. some law with a lot of popular support that politicians "support", fully knowing that it will not be constitutional (thus allowing them to shift the blame to the courts).
- pohuing 3y ago
  Well in a sense that should be the way to go I think. Your constituency wants something, you try to implement it with your means and see if it sticks. If it doesn't, you'll have to see if you can get wider support and fall back to just admitting that other rules supersede it. Call it blaming but it's the truth at the end of the day. Its just an issue that illegal laws can still be laws, but then again if everything needed a comprehensive legal check we'd get nothing done. I just have a sinking feeling that in some of your examples it's pretty blatant obvious corruption and certain politicians will get a comfy retirement soon. For example the highway tolls scandal was blatantly illegal and the idiots even signed laws on it. Costing us money now.
  - Tainnor 3y ago
    I don't think it should be "the way to go" because legal battles (especially before the Supreme Court) take forever to sort out, and in the meantime nobody can plan because nobody knows what's actually legal. I don't think politicians should try to test the limits of the constitution all the time - maybe there are exceptional circumstances in which this should happen, but it's happening too often. For example, no matter what you think of rent control in general, there's no doubt that the Berlin rent control law that was ruled unconstitutional caused massive damage because as soon as that ruling came, people had to pay their landlords back rent for several months. And I agree with you re. the highway toll. Which shows that this problem really isn't limited to one end of the political spectrum, it happens from left to right.

candiodari 3y ago

Have you not yet notice that essentially all EU regulations have blanket exceptions for anything done by states. EU states, including the EU itself, have blanket exceptions to the GPDR, for example. For example, they get to pass around private medical data, without telling anyone, supposedly in cases where they deem it to be important for investigations (not just criminal), anything to do with protection of minors, ... And because nobody cooperates well with this "for some reason", you find more than a few examples of them passing around (and using in court) WRONG private medical data. There has never been any conviction for this (DESPITE EU countries getting convicted for basing judgements on wrong medical data in their own EU courts). I imagine something similar is going on here.

xvector 3y ago
Most EU tech regs are designed to rent seek from big tech under the guise of privacy or consumer rights. They never actually apply the laws locally, or they carve out exceptions. Take the DMA and Spotify, or the AI Act and Mistral, etc. The blind cheering of EU regs is kinda wild to me. The worst tech regulation I've seen is out of the EU, from trying to destroy PKI and E2EE, or trying to break the transformer model, or a thousand other braindead initiatives.
- Tainnor 3y ago
  > They never actually apply the laws locally, or they carve out exceptions. This is incorrect: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
- vasco 3y ago
  I'm in europe and I agree to a certain extent. There are also european representatives that genuinely push for privacy, but I consider the GDPR a joke in its implementation by each local countries institutions, which everyone turns a blind eye toward, unless that local institution can use the GDPR as an excuse to not do something, which they take whenever they can. And then the EU turns around and uses the same regulations to go after Meta or Google Analytics. I'm way more worried that public employees in random government entities can look me up willy nilly than Facebook knowing I bought a pencil on Amazon.
  - hcfman 3y ago
    Everything they do is a joke. They also passed into law net neutrality. But you can't see anything that indicates that this is actually a law. And let's not talk about cookies.
- snowpid 3y ago
  Could you explain the DMA and Spotify? This does not make sense.
  - xvector 3y ago
    Spotify is a market maker as per the spirit of the DMA (ask any artist), but they are conveniently excluded from the DMA. The requirements of the DMA are gerrymandered to leave a curious hole in the place where Spotify would be. Mistral noted the AI Act was regulating the transformer model itself, and that the regulations were technically unsustainable and frankly incompetent[1]. The AI Act ended up carving out an exception for Mistral specifically, leaving the technically untenable system in place for American big tech. [1]: https://twitter.com/arthurmensch/status/1725076260827566562?s=20 https://twitter.com/arthurmensch/status/1725076260827566562?...
    - snowpid 3y ago
      " Spotify is a market maker as per the spirit of the DMA (ask any artist), but they are conveniently excluded from the DMA. The requirements of the DMA are gerrymandered to leave a curious hole in the place where Spotify would be. " Could you be more precise how to be market maker? Ask any artist is not a valid explaination. " The AI Act ended up carving out an exception for Mistral specifically, " Though I didnt ask for it please tell us more for the Mistral specific exception. And why it is bad to regulate American tech?
- amarcheschi 3y ago
  The part about applying laws locally is wrong. Here you can find a list of gdpr related fines throughout all europe: https://gdpr-fines.inplp.com/list/ https://gdpr-fines.inplp.com/list/ (There might be other gdpr fines trackers) As you can see, fines vary from small amounts to huge amounts, depending on the violations and the size of the company. in the first page some organizations are fined as small as 150€ and as big as 18.400.000£, the latter at page 13, involving Marriott international
logicchains 3y ago
>Have you not yet notice that essentially all EU regulations have blanket exceptions for anything done by states. It's the China model; the constitution guarantees a bunch of rights but then gives the party the right to override those rights any time it seems necessary. Which is completely unsurprising; what bureaucrat is going to write a law that limits their own power?
- vasco 3y ago
  A good one, there's many examples of laws limiting government power. Most constitutions usually include some provision to this effect.
- Tainnor 3y ago
  Courts are regularly imposing limits on what individual parties (notice the plural!) can do, what are you talking about?
  - candiodari 3y ago
    Kind of true, in the worst possible way. The ECHR for example regularly imposes limits on what states can do. Tiny issue when it comes to the EU: their judgements aren't enforced against states, and states just flat out refuse to enforce them. It, for example, ruled that Belgium can't keep imprisoning Freddy Horion, a murderer (who murdered when he was 24, he's now 75). He is still in prison, 10 years after the conviction of the Belgian state, who seem to be keeping him in prison mostly because he refuses to confess (and testify against a suspected accomplice), apparently for over 21 years now that is the reason he's in prison (and he hasn't received one cent of the money the Belgian state was convicted to pay him, since it was a penalty per day doubtless it is millions of euros now). Plus he's 75 ... Additionally he's been denied medical care at least twice. There's another Belgian prisoner, Farid Bamouhammad, who has been tortured in prison (hung up with cuffs by his throat to the heating system and left like that for more than 24 hours). The story has a horrific ending: he was denied medical care for 3 years. He ... has since died from the cancer (treatable at the beginning of those 3 years he was denied medical care by the justice system) he turned out to have. He was not paid damages either. There's more horror in this case. AND there's a general conviction of the Belgian justice system, on 2 separate aspects. Nothing has changed. Damages have not been paid. For the general convictions the damages, a small per-day per-prisoner amount, ignored by the state for a decade, are now absolutely ridiculous amounts that will never be paid. To give another example, ECHR ruled that the Danish MUST NOT allow child services to act in situations where parents cannot provide appropriate housing for children. Instead, it must use other institutions to provide housing to those families. Inappropriate housing is the number one reason children are placed out of their home, before ... and after the ruling. Obviously, once again, a few specific parents and children were to receive damages, they haven't received a cent. (this is especially ironic, since it'scourts going EXPLICITLY against a superior court, the ECHR, just because the executive requests them too. This is against the separation of powers and violates the very concept of a judicial system ... and the violators ... are judges) A Dutch general was convicted of war crimes during the Yugoslav war, and a bunch of people were promised payment for his crimes. He has not been punished, not even fined, and has since received the medal of Honor from the Dutch Royals. The money the Dutch state was convicted to pay has not been paid. Not a cent. Germany was convicted to be in the wrong to arrest 2 people who had crossed into Germany at the request of the Dutch state (they were -alleged- shoplifters, and they are innocent, in the sense that they were never convicted), and hand them over to the Dutch police. This failed to respect a long list of legal rights EU citizens supposedly have. Switzerland has been convicted of wrongfully convicting ... France has been convicted of holding prisoners in inhumane conditions (and we don't mean "a few", but 60% of all judicial prisoners) ... Now don't take this the wrong way. When ECHR convicts INDIVIDUALS (or companies) there is more enforcement. But against states ... states just ignore, nothing happens. Yes, there are cases of states actually paying, but looking up which ones they are (e.g. Turkey. One might remark ... Turkey ISN'T in the EU) makes this even worse. At least, everybody just sort of shuts up about these, as opposed to Hamas complaining Israel "is convicted of genocide by ICC" (which is a double lie: Israel isn't convicted, yet they, Palestine, ARE convicted, and ARE persisting in the crimes they are convicted of, no this isn't about the hostages, it's about earlier stuff). And they're screaming this everywhere. Now, I understand why they do it, but it remains utterly distasteful to lie like that.
impossiblefork 3y ago
Yes, but the ECHR does not.

littlestymaar 3y ago

EC isn't bound by ECHR, which isn't an instance of the European Union but one of the Council of Europe (not to be confused with European Council, which itself is a EU institution). The European Convention on Human Rights is an international convention, and EU is in fact supposed to adhere it eventually : its adhesion is planned in the Treaty of Lisbon but the process is kind of stuck because the CJEU (which is the justice court of the EU) ruled against the previous attempt. Until then, the European Commission isn't bound by a decision from ECHR. (Though the same arguments that were brought in front of the ECHR could be brought in front of the CJEU so that it rules against it, but it would rule on the basis of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU this time and not on the basis of the European Convention on Human Rights). Yes, European Union is kind of complicated, and the confusing naming make things even worse. Edit: fix the acronym of the Court of Justice of the EU, I mixed up the order of the letters in the English version.

Hamuko 3y ago
>EC isn't bound by ECHR, which isn't an instance of the European Union but one of the Council of Europe (not to be confused with European Council, which itself is a EU institution). Also not to be confused with Council of the European Union, often referred to in EU documents simply as "the Council", which is separate from those two still.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  I didn't want to put too much unrelated stuff in my post, but yeah, these three things have basically the same name yet are entirely different. Who thought it was a good idea?!
impossiblefork 3y ago
All the EU members are also members of the CoE and are bound by these things, so the commission is in fact bound by the ECHR. There is no way to implement any directive that goes against the ECHR.
- littlestymaar 3y ago

thefz 3y ago

Never going to go anywhere.

Tainnor 3y ago

Not that strange, unfortunately. Governments have a habit of passing laws (or budgets) that are then eventually declared unconstitutional by courts. We've had several cases of this happening in Germany in recent years (budgets, rent control laws, highway tolls, ...). At least in some cases, this could be a calculated move, e.g. some law with a lot of popular support that politicians "support", fully knowing that it will not be constitutional (thus allowing them to shift the blame to the courts).

pohuing 3y ago
Well in a sense that should be the way to go I think. Your constituency wants something, you try to implement it with your means and see if it sticks. If it doesn't, you'll have to see if you can get wider support and fall back to just admitting that other rules supersede it. Call it blaming but it's the truth at the end of the day. Its just an issue that illegal laws can still be laws, but then again if everything needed a comprehensive legal check we'd get nothing done. I just have a sinking feeling that in some of your examples it's pretty blatant obvious corruption and certain politicians will get a comfy retirement soon. For example the highway tolls scandal was blatantly illegal and the idiots even signed laws on it. Costing us money now.
- Tainnor 3y ago
  I don't think it should be "the way to go" because legal battles (especially before the Supreme Court) take forever to sort out, and in the meantime nobody can plan because nobody knows what's actually legal. I don't think politicians should try to test the limits of the constitution all the time - maybe there are exceptional circumstances in which this should happen, but it's happening too often. For example, no matter what you think of rent control in general, there's no doubt that the Berlin rent control law that was ruled unconstitutional caused massive damage because as soon as that ruling came, people had to pay their landlords back rent for several months. And I agree with you re. the highway toll. Which shows that this problem really isn't limited to one end of the political spectrum, it happens from left to right.