Now, every lobby group keeps pushing their sketchy agenda, knowing well that they will eventually pass it. Worst case, it will be passed bit by bit.
Currently the same proposal is being discussed over and over again but if that wouldn't be possible it's easy introduce "similar" ideas.
Ultimately law makers need to be able to pass new laws, even controversial ones, or the power to so slowly shifts to someone else (e.g. the executive in the USA)
Not having a majority is the only way to stop the process and if the population is in favor, doesn't care or can't be bothered any law will pass.
But how does banning subsequent attempts at passing bills prevent this? Moreover what's preventing this mechanism from being abused to block legislation that society actually want?
I do think there are procedural ways to support this, like: proposed bills that are very similar to previous rejected ones need a preemptive vote with 60%+ support to be considered - if brought again with a certain time frame.
I do see your point though, there can be unforeseen consequences.
So some cool off period that gets larger each time a bill fails. There is not a detailed proposal, but I would assume some max cool off period is reasonable/desirable as well.
So it could not be used to block legislation that society actually wants forever but it would block the legislature from passing it in a limited time frame.
Another reasonable addition that would work well at more local levels but would be a new challenge to implement at the national level in the USA is to have citizen lead referendums with minimum participation requirements to by pass this cool off period. That way if legislation is important the voters can bypass the cool off period.
Think about this one, start a populist stupid referendum like: "Should the gov give you $10M?", I could bet it will end up at 90% yes and the entire country ends up in ruins. So democracy is good but you need some sort of trust in the middle. With this backward law, the trust is eroding.
I think people might agree with that if they alone were going to get the money, but far too many people vote against their own interests to keep "the wrong people" from getting anything. They'd never allow a "give everyone 10M" referendum to pass.
In actuality, most of the stupid decisions that drove countries to the ground are made by "respected statesmen".
Who is "we" though? The elites with interests counter to what's best for the people, for example, surely want the opposite.
Focusing on these supposedly well-meaning individuals - I'm going to assume they somehow never consumed any dystopian fiction as a child, the purpose of which was to inoculate a generation against totalitarianism. They don't understand the overreach they are committing to. They think that, because they're a Good Person and wouldn't abuse it, nobody else will, and the massive security loophole created by this effort will not have any downsides. They'll just be able to stop all the baddies!
Meanwhile, those of us who live in reality know that:
* smart criminals will just use unlicensed technologies to get around this, trivially
* dumb criminals will figure out how to use code words for plausible deniability / bayesian "hide in plain sight"
* political dissidents who are exercising free speech will become more vulnerable than ever
And, of course, that's all if the government was only populated by good people who don't intend to abuse this! I have no reason to believe that; does anyone? Is there anyone who so truly loves their government in 2025 that they want them reading all their messages (even moreso than now)?
Can't wait to go to jail for texting a meme to the group chat.
For a second I thought that was a great hypothetical example, then I remembered that's a thing that actually happens now in the UK and got a little sad instead.
Balance access to governance with fairness, and accept that you will never always get your way.
Similar to this, indeed some kind of fair and predictable cooling off period for a piece of legislation ensures the governing body isn't frozen in one influential faction's obsessions, while also allowing the voice of the people that faction represents to still be heard.
But exponential backoff feels too open to be gamed by countervailing factions. Some small period of time within a session however could make sense.
The bill is being pushed and reintroduced by elected representatives from each country, both in the council as well as EP.
People electing populist elements and then being surprised pikachu at the suboptimal policies.
In the same way you can't be prosecuted twice for the same crime in the US system under the "double jeopardy" clause, there should be an equivalent system where the same law can't be pushed over and over until it passes.
For instance, when local white juries would acquit white defendants in for lynching black people in the South, the federal government could (and did) try them again for the crime of violating the victim's civil rights. Same set of facts, but different crime. Not double jeopardy because they were being prosecuted for a different crime.
That doesn't work for legislation, because defining when a law is "the same" is basically impossible. If I change one word, is it the same? What if I "ship of Theseus" the law? At what point is it a different law?
Many legislatures ban members from repeatedly bring the same bill in the same session, which does require a similar determination. But that's a much weaker prohibition (even if the determination was wrong, you can always bring the law for a vote next year), and it is a necessary limitation to allow the legislature to get other work done without having members clog the process by bringing the same bill for a vote over and over again.
Also it would be easy to weaponised by proposing something that doesn’t have enough support now so that it can never be passed in the future.
So if gay marriage or weed legalization was defeated in 2015 you shouldn't be able to have a go at it until 2025? Or if YIMBY zoning reforms or AI regulation were defeated in 2025 you shouldn't be able try again until 2035?
To use the prior example: They could create a criminal reform act which makes weed legal, but also (by total coincidence) makes child rape legal.
Nobody will vote for the pedophiles, so now they have successfully prevented weed legalization for at least 10 years, and they can use a different poison pill next time.
Before you say "well, bring it back without the child rape part", see my other comment in this thread about deciding whether two bills are the same.
That being said, I agree that it probably isn't the most practical approach. It feels too vague to have any teeth, and if we were to collectively spend political capital to implement something like that, we may as well be more direct and push to constitutionally enshrine digital bills of rights that nip all this nonsense in the bud for good. No more E2EE bans, VPN bans, mandatory backdoors, age verification laws, undermining of Section-230-style protections, or criminalization of online speech — throw it all out, and roadblock any such future attempts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_jeopardy
The clause in the US constitution specifically has no time limits and it looks like it's the same for all the countries listed on wiki.
So if party A votes down proposal X and the next election party B that publicly supports it wins they shouldn't be allowed to propose that law?
Logical conclusion would be for the governing party to get some stooge to propose all the policies they oppose, get them far enough to the voting stage and reject them. Now your opponents can't do anything even if you lose the next election...
Of course doesn't really apply to pseudo-democratic institutions like the EU..
The problem is that parliamentary law and democratic processes have ossified for the last 175 years, while "positive" bills have been passed to push more power to the executive, but can't be removed without supermajorities (that are now impossible because the executive has more power over elections and the schedule.) The last person to think seriously about parliamentary law was Thomas Jefferson, and he was really just encoding, organizing into a coherent system, and debugging Commons practice.
If you think that the US has pushed too much power into the Executive, you should look at recent history (since the 80s-90s) in Britain. The opposition has no power at all, and even backbenchers in government have no power at all. They've been reduced to hoping that the right marble gets pulled from a bowl that allows them to hopefully read a bill out loud that might get on tv that might get an article written about it that goes viral, that might put pressure on the government to do something about it.
The EU doesn't even have that level of democracy.
> you should look at recent history (since the 80s-90s) in Britain .. and even backbenchers in government have no power at all
All pro EU Conservatives were forced to either get in line or commit political suicide since local party constituencies aren't allowed to pick their representatives. US at least has primaries...
Now I suppose theoretically one day all the other 100 members of parliament accidentally push the wrong button but it seems farfetched.
I know a million reasons why that’s probably impossible, starting with “what makes it the same law?”, but I can still wish we had one.
E.g. in this case something like a "right to chat secrecy" law.
Just because you can still drive over speed bumps and knock over road blocks doesn't mean that they aren't effective tools.
Seems extremely easy to abuse...
Some others here asked how would we decide what is the same law. That’s pretty easy: same as with many other not so clear things, if some sues a judge/jury hears both sides and makes a decision.
We should fund another lobby that pull in the other direction.
This fundemantally conflicts with a lesson startup scene learned very early: Fail fast, fail often. Our societies do not fail fast when they make mistakes, thanks to the incredible safety and stability intelligent and sensible people created.
This is preventing people from learning from their idiocies, which in turn allows them to reach to critical mass and forcing their idiocy on the whole society in the form of bullshit or hurtful laws and orders.
We should change this and let idiots fail fast before they become a danger to everyone.
However, we could envision a rule where controversial bills have to be validated by a strict majority, or even a supermajority (75% minimum) of the voting population via referendum.
I feel like in 2025 it should be doable for a state to ask its citizens to vote online to show that they support a bill, and if a given bill lacks support amongst the citizen body of that state, it's probably not worth passing.
I don't think that's workable:
* If it only works for exact bills, they'll just change a tiny bit and resubmit, and we're back to square one but with frustrating procedures/paperwork.
* If it works for approximate bills, then it will be abused by opponents that introduce fatally-flawed versions of your good bill in order to block you from ever getting it voted-on.
France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed EU constitution... nevermind, the same was in the later Lisbon treaty.
Ireland rejected the Nice and Lisbon treaties... nevermind they still passed when asked again after cosmetic changes and "information campaigns".
Poland voted for the wrong government... EU suspended funds until they voted for the right government at the next election.
I am polish, please *do not spread falsehood*.
EU funds suspension came because of Polish non-compliance with several EU laws.
Most notably the previous government had created a "new" government-controlled chamber of judgement that gave de facto the executive branch control over the judicial one.
Judges in Poland could be suspended and punished if politicians didn't like their rulings. Not only that, judges could be suspended, fined and even jailed over any public comment.
This created a situation where essentially judges where promoted, punished or cherry picked according to how aligned they were to the ruling party.
This was a blatant violation of Polish constitution as well as the treaties Poland itself signed when joining the EU.
What matters are facts: Poland violated several points of the Treaty of the European Union, the EU Charter and CJEU rulings all stating the same thing: to be part of the European Union rule of law must be respected.
In other words: the judicial branch of power has to be independent. Politicians write laws. Judges and not politicians, rule on whether they are respected or not.
And again, I'm Polish, I know what I'm talking about: the previous government went far in bending the constitution, controlling the press and the judges taking our country step after step towards a dictatorship.
On the other end there is the "don't interfere with anything" and you get totalitarianism as a side effect, eventually. If a democratically elected government passes a law that makes killing some category of people lawful, should they be allowed to do it?
There are many groups with agendas to kill or expel gay people, trans people, Muslims, atheists, etc. It's sadly normal for those groups to exist; it's not normal for them to be anywhere close to power and we need to stop them getting power because we already know what happens if they get power. "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" and all that.
I believe someone said in a previous thread that a court in an EU member state had already found this mass surveillance on citizens who are not criminal suspects to be illegal under either their constitution or the Charter of Fundamental Rights, but I can't find it anymore. I am wondering why that is not sufficient to permanently block this.
Edit: This is not to say that you shouldn't resist the laws at every other level, too, because you definitely should.
Nice! They will keep trying until they wear people down. Keep up the great battle!
Each time the courts disqualify a parliamentary law or executive decision, it has to spend political power. If the decisions or laws it stop are all from the same side, that side can start chipping the courts power away. The reason for the legislative part to exist is to avoid a dictatorship of the majority (basically X is arrested for something, Y is not even though he did the same thing, because Y is from the majority group). Having the ECHR censoring the law would have been sold by a lot of media as "the ECHR is supporting pedophiles" and "those non-elected judges wants to keep abusing children", and hopefully after a dozen years of similar attemps, the court would be either defanged or totally partisan.
Note, especially, how many judgements are about the state already getting convicted a first time and then immediately violating the judgement, and in some cases the size of the convictions tells you something:
https://www.echr.coe.int/w/judgment-concerning-t%C3%BCrkiye-...
(over 6000 very serious individual violations by law enforcement)
Or take https://www.echr.coe.int/w/judgment-concerning-greece-9 where the Greek state illegally abducted 2 children and moved the to the US. Obviously this court provides no recourse, and the Greek state is entirely free to just totally ignore the judgement.
So where do you get this idea that law enforcement or the state will respect the law when they don't get what they want?
- Lobbying. Thorn and other "NGOs" are shaking in excitement about new revenue streams by providing the surveillance software. https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
- Scanning of your emails and storage etc. is illegal in EU. The EU parliament voted for an exception which allows it (https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/167712). It has been extended twice and is set to expire in April 2026. EU parliament threatened to not extend it again. This proposal should become a law which permanently replaces it and is revised every 3 years. A nice opportunity to include scanning of your encrypted communication too.
The title needs to be corrected. It's borderline maliciously incorrect.
What do they have to hide, exactly? After all, their logic tells us that they shouldn't worry if they have nothing to hide, right? And if anyone should have their chats publicly available, the number 1 people should be the scumbags that are pushing for this so adamantly. Let's see them lead by example, then maybe I would consider this as anything other than a draconian power grab.
The cooling period does not preclude discussion of course. That's why we pay the MEPs: They are actually expected to show up in the EP and discuss. Not only show up on voting day and follow what their party dictated.
when those students enter the workforce, they expect the surveilance. they grew up under chat control so they're used to it. get with the times to live and die another day
...for the school shooters, i presume.?
...for the school shooters, i presume?
The ruling should come with a timeout period; they're not allowed to try anything similar again for 20 years or whatever, and even then only if circumstances have changed.
Also, are you sure most population is against ? I did not see a poll on that. I know enough people that like "authoritarian" governments and laws, so I think we (the ones that don't agree) should make an effort to convince people that too much "authority" is not the most efficient/smart way. Some of those people are in fact just afraid even if they would not admit it...
The problem is that these kinds of laws tend to be one-way streets. Once systems are in place, they are hard to remove, so there should be some protection against unenlightened authorities just trying again and again and 'getting lucky'.
(And I need to understand why the hell my country, Italy, supports the motion)
I mean, "organized crime" and "Italy" probably appears in a couple of n-grams in LLMs index, right ? Maybe even if you narrow it down to reviews of movie trilogies from the 70s ?
That being said, I'm sure you will disagree. The whole discussion on those topics is about mistrust:
- law enforcement claims to need tools to prosecute organized crime (which does exists), and claims any opponents is just mafias masquerading as concerned citizens.
- opponents claims the new tool is only meant for surveillance, and claims any opponent is just an autocrat masquerading as concerned parents.
- fun fact 1 : both autocrats and mafias exist
- fun fact 2 : reading some messages mean reading all messages
Which is why we have the debate every few years.
Meanwhile law enforcements use other tools (they have been for years), mafias are still out there, organized crime is still harming lots of people, and encrypted messages are relatively safe - but people use unencrypted FB's messaging because it's easier.
Meanwhile Meloni has deployed NSO against Italian journalists.