Paris/Brussels, Wednesday, June 20th, 2012. Press release.
ACTA [5] threatens fundamental freedoms online, Net neutrality, innovation, access to free/libre technologies and to essential medicines. The European Parliament has all the evidence needed to reject it, and if it were to postpone the final vote on the agreement it would be seen as escaping its political responsibility.
On Thursday, June 21st, Members of the International Trade (INTA) committee of the EU Parliament will issue their final recommendation on ACTA to the rest of the Parliament.
So far all committees have called for the rejection of ACTA. We urge the INTA members to do the same, and vote against any amendment calling for the adoption of ACTA or for postponing the final vote of the Parliament. Delaying the vote is a deceptive stratagem that the EU Commission and industry lobbies have been pushing for weeks in order to save face.
Members of the EU Parliament must take on their political duty and protect citizens against this dangerous agreement. It is more than urgent to break away from ACTA's repressive logic, and make the fundamental policy distinction between real, harmful counterfeiting of physical goods and the sharing practices that are the building blocks for our culture and for a better society.
Signatories:
ABUL (France) http://www.abul.org [6]
Act-Up Paris (France) http://www.actupparis.org/ [7]
AIDES (France) http://www.aides.org/ [8]
Alternative Informatics Association (Turkey) http://www.alternatifbilisim.org/ [9]
April (France, EU) http://april.org/ [10]
Asociación de Internautas http://www.internautas.org/ [11]
Atlatszo.hu (Hungary) http://www.atlatszo.hu [12]
Bits of Freedom (Netherlands) http://bof.nl [13]
Coalition PLUS (International) http://www.coalitionplus.org/ [14]
Constant, Association For Arts and Media (Brussels) http://www.constantvzw.org [15]
Datapanik (Belgium) http://datapanik.org/ [16]
Digitale Gesellschaft e.V. (Germany) https://digitalegesellschaft.de/ [17]
Digital Freedom and Rights Organisation (Sweden) https://www.dfri.se/ [18]
European Digital Rights (EU) http://edri.org [19]
Electronic Frontier Finland (Finland) http://www.effi.org/ [20]
Fédération FDN (France) http://fdn.org/ [21]
Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (EU) http://www.ffii.org/ [22]
Foundation Institute for Regional Development (Poland) http://firr.org.pl [23]
Foundation for information policy research (UK, EU) http://www.fipr.org/ [24]
Framasoft (France) http://framasoft.org/ [25]
Free Culture Forum (Spain, EU) http://fcforum.net [26]
Free and Open Source [27] Software Foundation (Poland) http://www.fwioo.pl/ [28]
Fundacja Projekt: Polska (Poland) http://projektpolska.pl/ [29]
Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge (Hungary) http://hsbp.org/ [30]
Internet Society - Bulgaria (Bulgaria) http://www.isoc.bg/ [31]
Internet Society - Poland (Poland) http://www.isoc.org.pl/ [32]
La Quadrature du Net (France, EU) http://laquadrature.net/ [33]
La Ligue des droits de l'Homme (Belgium) http://liguedh.be/ [34]
Liga voor Mensenrechten (Belgium) http://mensenrechten.be/ [35]
Net Users' Rights Protection Association (Belgium, EU) http://nurpa.be/ [36]
Open Rights Group (United Kingdom) http://www.openrightsgroup.org/ [37]
Open Standards Alliance (Hungary) http://nyissz.hu [38]
Panoptykon Foundation (Poland) http://panoptykon.org/ [39]
Polish Linux User Group (Poland) http://www.linux.org.pl/ [40]
Reporters Without Borders (International) http://en.rsf.org/ [41]
Solthis (France) http://www.solthis.org/ [42]
Vrijschrift (Netherlands) https://vrijschrift.org/ [43]
X.net (Spain) http://whois--x.net/ [44]