Visualising EU law

It's just a thought that I had a minute ago because I am working on images in politics right now: Why not try to visualise EU law?

Earlier this morning, via the EU Law (Wordpress) blog, I came across the newly published Rules of Procedure of the European Commission.

I don't think many people outside the institutions will actually read this. It is boring. It is interlaced. As most EU law.

But the rules of procedure (or the Lisbon Treaties), if you read and understand them, produce a visual image of personalities and interactions in your mind, simplified representations of the legal provisions translated into simple pictures or simplified real-life situations.

This should be translated into visual laws.

I am not a very artistic person. That is why I cannot come up with a visual solution myself. But some of you might.

What I am thinking of is an iconographic way of re-writing pieces of law: One could use existing images or invent icons for each and every institution, procedure, document type etc. On can use arrows and other meaningful symbols to show relations of hierarchy, co-operation etc.

When one replaces major parts of existing legal text with these icons and images, one could quickly go through a law and see the connections between its parts through the same or similar visual representations. Complexity of language that is made for and by legal professionals could be reduced to images that can be understand by non-professionals.

And with a click on every image one would get an explanation explaining for what it stands, and, maybe, what other images are directly linked to this image.

Probably this is not very innovative, it must have been thought before. Probably it is not doable because it might have been used already if it was. Probably it's just a thought.

European patent regulation and litigation: Council progress report

The EU Council is working on two major issues regarding patents at the moment:

• a Regulation of the Council on the Community patent
  
• an Agreement creating a Unified Patent Litigation System
  

The preparatory work for both of these issues is done by the Council Working Party on Intellectual Property, and now the Competitiveness Council will deal with these issues next week (28-29 May 2009).

For this purpose, the Czech Council Presidency has prepared a progress report (five readable pages) from which I could see that the major topic of the Unified Patent Litigation System will be the setting up of a European and Community Patents Court for which an updated draft agreement and draft statute have been published in March.

Article 14a of the agreement defines the legal scope of this Court that shall replace "the current fragmented patent litigation system" (progress report):

Article 14a Applicable law

(1) When hearing a case brought before it under this Agreement, the Court shall respect Community law and base its decisions on:

(a) this Agreement;
(b) directly applicable Community law, in particular Council Regulation (EC) No … on the Community patent, and national law of the Contracting States implementing Community law […];
(c) the European Patent Convention and national law which has been adopted by the Contracting States in accordance with the European Patent Convention; and
(d) any provision of international agreements applicable to patents and binding on all the Contracting Parties.

(2) To the extent that the Court shall base its decisions on national law of the Contracting States, the applicable law shall be determined:

(a) by directly applicable provisions of Community law, or
(b) in the absence of directly applicable provisions of Community law, by international instruments on private international law to which all Contracting Parties are parties; or
(c) in the absence of provisions referred to in (a) and (b), by national provisions on international private law as determined by the Court.

The Council Regulation on the Community Patent has seen a latest draft version in April, and it looks like work will continue for a while, since the progress report states that this revised version "should form the basis for further discussion and work on the outstanding issues in the coming months" (highlighted by me).

Finally, the Czech Presidency concludes the progress report with the following outlook:

"With respect to the unified patent litigation system, the Presidency, in line with the wishes of a large majority of Member States, believes that the Council should request an opinion of the [European Court of Justice] on the compatibility of the unified patent litigation system with the EC Treaty. Finally, the Presidency considers that the Working Party should continue work with a view to enabling the Council to reach an overall agreement on both files as soon as possible."

The Europeanisation of law-making in Germany: Overrated!

I have just read a scientific article from September 2008 titled

"Das Regieren jenseits des Nationalstaates und der Mythos einer 80-Prozent-Europäisierung in Deutschland"

('Governing beyond the nation state and the myth of an 80% Europeanisation in Germany') by Thomas König and Lars Mäder.

In this article, the authors try to analyse thoroughly how many laws in Germany have been passed based on European impulses. The figures they use are mainly based on the public database of the Bundestag (the German parliament) and supplemented with data form the EUR-LEX database.

What they find is that

• from 1976-2005, 24% of all German laws have had a European impulse, with the 2002-2005 legislative period being the peak with 35,7%;

• from 1980-2005, 24% of all German laws with financial implications had an EU impulse, with the 2002-2005 legislative period being the peak with 35,8%;

• from 1976-2005, 14,6% of all German laws with key importance were initiated by the EU, with the 2002-2005 period being the peak at 33,3%.
  

In certain policy areas like justice or agriculture, the figures can go above the 50% - but if the work was correct, figures above 70% in particular regarding the total amount of laws do not seem realistic under a quantitative and even under a restricted qualitative perspective (i.e. based on the the concept of "key importance").

This also confirms doubts raised lately by Open Europe about these figures flying around during the European Parliament election campaign.

European Parliament elections 2009 (48): Grahnlaw on the EU law foundations of the EP elections - update

Since Ralf Grahn runs the best legal EU blog on earth, I would just like to point to his recent article titled "EU Law: European Parliament elections".

Everything is in there, including a historical comment and other critical remarks - so don't ask me, ask Ralf!

Update:

Also don't miss Ralf's follow-up on the information provided by the EU institutions for the 2009 elections, notably the EP elections 2009 website I have also criticised some time ago. And don't forget the article on the bases for the number of MEPs.

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Under the category "European parliament elections 2009" I am following up national and European activities on the path to the European Parliament elections 2009.

For an overview over all articles in this category have a look at the overview article.

For the five newest post see also the sidebar.