Bulgaria and Netherlands back away from ACTA

More dominoes are falling in the global fight to kill ACTA -- Bulgaria and the Netherlands have joined Germany and many other EU nations in refusing to move further on the secretive copyright treaty that was negotiated without transparency, oversight, or civil society participation.

"I will table a proposal to the Council of Ministers to stop the procedure of Bulgaria's signing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement," Traikov said.

The decision means Bulgaria will not take any action concerning Acta before European Union member states come up with a unified position.

Meanwhile, the Dutch Lower House has backed a motion from the Green Left party which says the Netherlands should, for the time being, refrain from signing Acta, according to a report at Radio Netherlands Worldwide.

The RNW report says that the parliament is seeking clarity about whether the treaty threatens the rights and the privacy of internet users.

On a related note, Redjade submitteratored this video shot at Saturday's anti-ACTA march in Budapest.

Acta loses more support in Europe

Stop ACTA & TPP: Tell your country's officials: NEVER use secretive trade agreements to meddle with the Internet. Our freedoms depend on it!

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• [Buddy Bradley]

  very cool! I know redjade, he’s very active here in Budapest.  fwiw Hungary has already signed ACTA, I seriously doubt the government will back away from it.  They’re already dismantling democracy in this country, ACTA is just another manifestation of that.

• [redjade]

  wow, ive never been boinged before :-)  an honour!

• [Noctilucent Studios]

  May the dominoes continue to fall!!! Great news.

• [lanzz]

  Fun populism around the Bulgarian retraction: the official position was “ACTA will have absolutely no impact on Bulgarian law” until 10k people went on protest against the treaty. Next thing you know, Bulgaria is halting all process on ratification, and our prime minister Boiko Borisov proudly announces that “stopping ACTA is our [the ruling party's] success”, and tries to blame all ACTA negotiations on the previous (socialist) government. The problem is, Borisov’s government has been in power for about two and a half years now, and certainly the previous government wasn’t in power on November 16th last year, when the cabinet approved the Bulgarian signature on ACTA, and on January 11th this year, when the Bulgarian ambassador in Tokyo was authorized to sign the treaty. But oh well, we’re out of ACTA at least. For now.

  • [Martijn]

    Some background on the Dutch situation: the opposition voted against it, but not the ruling parties. Now the problem with out current situation is that the PVV (Geert Wilders) is officially not part of the government coalition, but they do support it. It’s a sick relationship where the PVV does and says really outrageous things, and the government parties don’t say anything about it because they need his support. Quite often they give him whatever he wants in order to keep his continued support.

    Now the PVV opposes ACTA, but if the governing parties (VVD and CDA) really want Netherland to support ACTA, they can probably easily bribe him by enacting restrictions for eastern Europeans working in Netherland, or something like that.

• [paulcarcosa]

  Great news, but Strasbourg will have the final say on ACTA in the EU.

• [nomind]

  Heh, I’m Bulgarian and I just learned the good news from here. I should read the local media more often (then again, maybe not).
  The protest was lots of fun, I only wish it wasn’t so freaking cold. I’m glad though that the only police ‘repression’ we had was that it was forbidden to wear masks (and people did it anyway).

• [Qat]

  Hi. Just to say : the first link should point to 
  http://www.killacta.org/ and not killacta.com (domain for sale).

  Keep up the good fight !

• [teapot]

   More reasons for O’Reilly to rail on those depraved, stoned Dutch.

  Thanks for being Europe, Europe. You might wear funnily-cut shirts and enjoy strange electro, but you sure know when and where to draw the line for personal liberty.

  ….Except France.