Labour MEP Edward Scicluna was reported to have made the following statement when addressing students at a university debate yesterday. Here, with all the caveats related to “il detto del detto” is how the Times reported him:
Edward Scicluna appealed to students not to try and understand the details of Acta but rather to see who the players behind it are.
That to me was a telling statement and I will be telling you why in a bit. J’accuse has held back from taking a position on ACTA for the simple, yet important, reason that we hate to comment on issues when we are not well informed about them. ACTA is not the only legal conundrum that is currently hitting the headlines in Malta. The Franco Debono saga for example, has provoked a number of cliché calls for “improving the law” in areas as varied as party financing and libel law. Meanwhile thanks to a combination of random acts of incivility, colourful press reporting and the political party bandwagon movement, “hate crimes” are the new in-thing when calling for legal reform. Finally the reaction to the acquittal of Mark Camilleri and Alex Vella Gera in the Li Tkisser Sewwi saga continued to confound public perception of the law and how it works.
It’s Constitutional Law 101 and Political Philosophy 101 that we are talking about here. It’s the basics of a working society with all its imperfections that keep the complex mechanics ticking. Once the curtain is lifted off the latest fad and once the clichés are removed* we might end up showing that when waging a war on the law (or as the Clash would have it – Fighting the law) victory can be achieved only if we understand what we are up against. If there is anything to be up against. Otherwise we end up shooting ourselves in the foot.
(P)ACTA sunt servanda?
So. Let’s start with ACTA in this first of a number of posts that will look at public perception of rules and law. Why is Edward Scicluna’s statement telling? Because it is redolent of a large part of the activist reaction on the net to ACTA. I was pleased to have Andrei Tuch as a guest poster on the matter and his line of reasoning confirmed a hunch of mine. Basically opposition to ACTA is not so much an opposition to its content or what it will do but is based on the wider, worldwide philosophy of Anti-Big Brotherism. Andrei tells us that ACTA is not evil, but we should oppose it just the same. Some go even further: don’t bother finding out what ACTA is about says Edward Scicluna, just see who is proposing it, who is behind it. Seriously?
Even the MEP rapporteur who walked out of parliament in Strasbourg had nothing more to say against the content other than the fact that the procedure leading to ACTA’s creation was veiled in secrecy without public consultation. The lack of serious objections to content except for the circulation of “fear-inducing” myths about individuals being strip searched at borders for illegal software content is worrying. ACTA of course was unfortunate enough to follow the infamous SOPA and PIPA and therefore had to face the same tsunami of generalised freedom-fighting. Whether or not you agree that rights holders are pursuing “outdated business models” and whether or not you believe that they should be embracing the economic positives of sharing files is irrelevant. If you are going to oppose a law or an agreement, the least you could do is read it and challenge it on the basis of content. Not on who wrote it.
As I said earlier, don’t get me started on the bandwagon riding by the local parties. Labour is extremely disappointing in this regard because it pounced on what it perceives to be public sentiment against ACTA – that same public sentiment that was riding the wave of misinformation. The biggest disappointment is that when it comes to representation you’d expect representatives to have an informed and reasoned opinion. When they come up with “ignore the details, we just don’t like the people”, then their populism is hanging out for those who want to see it.
ACTA is doomed because it was ill-timed and ill-marketed (ironically). In many ways its story runs parallel to improving the salaries of parliamentarians – or as we know it the increase in honoraria. You (probably) could have many positive arguments in favour of such an increase if you sat down and examined the work of each deserving member and more. You probably could debate this logically at the right time and end up with some kind of agreement. Instead what we had was a stealthy introduction of honoraria by government and worse still this was made in the middle of an economic crisis. Talk about bad timing.
It becomes irrelevant whether you have any arguments in favour of the ACTA right protection or honoraria. The irrelevance is caused by the stealthy (publicly perceived as guilty) approach and the bad timing (post-SOPA or mid-economic crisis). What these two processes teach us is that public opinion is fragile and will more often than not not bother with the nitty gritty and the fine print. Throw in press reporting, mass media scrutiny and political opportunism into the fray and public opinion turns into that bull in a china shop that has just seen red.
Next: Censors, the law and satire.
* Here’s a handful of clichés for you: all lawyers are bastards, stop talking legalese, the court is only a waste of time, courts are all corrupt, law is only a way to enslave citizens.
