(From left) Minister of Administration and digitization Michal Boni, PM Tusk and Culture Minister Bogdan Zdrojewski face their critics: photo - PAP/Radek Pietruszka
NGOs, lawyers, bloggers, journalists and other interested parties converged at the Prime Minister's Office, where Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the delegates that the European Parliament will debate the controversial agreement after proposals are put forward by the European Commission this June.
“We will not rush into [ratifying ACTA] until questions have been answered around issues of national law and the tension between copyright holders and users of the internet,” Tusk said during the debate.
The debate, say Tusk's critics, is a belated attempt to launch a consultation process after the government was shocked by the level of protest against the ACTA agreement which Poland signed alongside other EU nations, in Japan at the end of last month.
PM Tusk apologised for “an inadequate consultation process” before the document was signed in Tokyo.
Several NGOs, including the Helsinki Foundation, protested yesterday that the government was not being “fully transparent” about the ACTA agreement, and has been withholding some materials connected with the issue.
But Tusk answered his critics by saying that withholding some documents “was not a whim” on behalf of the government. “International negotiations, sometimes legal or commercial, are not always, or should not be always made public,” he said.
“We must seek a new regulation that respects liberty and the security of internet users [which is] as fair as possible to all participants […] and not take one side or the other,” Tusk added.
Maciej Gawronski, a lawyer at the Polish Chamber of Information and Telecommunications claimed that ACTA “changes nothing, or almost nothing” as regards Polish law.
But changes needed to be made to “nineteenth century copyright law” in the internet age, he said.
Attacks on government web sites and the hacking of the Prime Minister's Office we site preceded and followed the signing of the agreement.
Opposition parties, from the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) to the liberal Palikot Movement have vowed to oppose the ratification by parliament of the ACTA agreement. (pg)