Take a look with us at what the Pirate MEPs worked on last year. Written by Mikuláš Peksa, Pirate Party MEP and Chairperson of the European Pirates.
The whole world is still battling an unending pandemic. This year, we Europeans gained a new privilege – the unified Covid Pass in our pockets, opening doors to us across the EU. It allows us to use one QR code to travel everywhere from Finland to the Canary Islands.
The Pirates fought for a decentralised Covid Pass solution, which was approved by the Commission in the end. This prevented the creation of a pan-European database that would store all our sensitive health data and potentially expose them to the risk of misuse.
I have been pushing for a waiver on vaccine production patents in the European Parliament. These patents needlessly limit vaccine production, allowing only developer companies and a handful of their partners to produce it. This makes vaccination much more expensive and slower, which will cause unnecessary mutation developments and, in the end, also a long-term risk for states with high vaccination rates. I believe that since the vaccine research was funded by taxpayers, it is only fair to make the manuals for making them public. I, therefore, appealed to the European Commission and Council to support the waiver initiative.
Thanks to the new European Digital Services Act, Europeans’ personal data will be better protected. I served as the rapporteur for this file in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) and as shadow rapporteur in the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy. I believe this legislation is nothing short of revolutionary.
The DSA will create wholly new rules for large online platforms. Big digital players, such as Facebook and Goole, have been abusing their dominant positions in the market and collecting masses of our personal data without our consent. The DSA will let the EU jump ahead of the USA, which will table similar legislation in the upcoming years, and become the first region in the world to replace out-of-date pre-Facebook regulation.
The central idea of the Digital Services Act is to modernise the EU’s approach to these platforms and make them more transparent, accessible, and free. One of the Pirates’ primary goals, which I managed to make a part of the final ECON and ITRE reports, is what we call interoperability. This will allow Europeans to communicate across platforms, opening the digital services market to smaller players. We also fought to protect users’ privacy by clearly defining the right to take down illegal content.
In the ECON committee, I was also the main rapporteur for the EU’s DORA regulation, which sets out new rules for your financial data and money security. The number of cyberattacks is growing every year. The biggest ones have the potential to take down an entire banking corporation, endangering the interests of clients – EU citizens. DORA aims to make sure the reaction to cyberattacks is swift, effective, and, most importantly, planned. The regulation unifies and improves the requirements on the IT security of financial services, thus minimising the impact of attacks and better protecting our money.
The damage caused by similar attacks can easily amount to eight-figure numbers in crowns. DORA, therefore, introduces the requirement to make adequate crisis plans. I also think key Pirate achievements include a centralised model for incident reporting, independent monitoring of security audits, and sharing data with authorities. Until now, these requirements differed across member states, forcing banks to comply with 27 different rule sets. The DORA legislation simplified this system under a unified EU framework.
In the CONT committee, I have been focusing on oversight over the allocation of EU funds. At a time of massive investment into mitigating the climate crisis and the pandemic, it is especially essential to make sure the redistribution of money in EU funds is transparent. As shadow rapporteur, I worked on the European Parliament’s recommendations on digitalisation of budgetary control, addressing many issues with loss of funds due to fraud and corruption. In 2019, this amounted to a whopping 3.37 billion EUR.
The new standardised digital monitoring system should prevent this unnecessary loss of funds. Citizens deserve to know where their money goes, so the new system must be as transparent as possible. I have also been working to create a shared European Beneficial Ownership Register with public and verifiable information. It is the only thing that will allow the public and journalists to uncover fraud and corruption. I believe that the European Union can only deserve public trust if it is entirely open and responsive to its citizens.
This year, my wish also came true when the European Public Prosecutor Office (EPPO) was founded. It is responsible for investigating and prosecuting actions suspect of embezzling EU funds. Every member state that takes part in the EPPO appointed its own candidates as European Public Prosecutors. The EPPO, a pan-European and independent body, can also tackle cross-border fraud, which has proven a tough nut to crack for national courts.
The EPPO has processed 300 fraud and corruption cases in its first three months, amounting to 4.5 billion EUR from the EU budget. This money can definitely find better use than lining the pockets of oligarchs and swindlers used to exploiting EU funds and people’s trust. One such case is the former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, who will face prosecution by the European Public Prosecutor Office.
I was also the main rapporteur for creating a shared, unified, and independent EU ethical framework, which was one of the priorities of Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission. 50 % of former EU Commissioners and 30 % of former MEPs now work in organisations labelled as lobbies by the EU. This allows them to exploit their exceptional standing in the EU structures and their connections to EU politics. That is what the ethical framework aims to tackle, improving the transparency of lobby meetings, public procurement, the acceptance of gifts, or bank account use for public funds.
This year, I was one of the few Czech M(E)Ps actively involved in protecting the Czech landscape and environment. My MEP office has been focusing on the issue of the Bečva disaster and the mining in Turów, which I see as clear rule of law failures. In these cases, Brussels is a source of hope for affected citizens when national governments fail. At the moment, the European Parliament is discussing a petition by Czech citizens affected by the mining in the Polish Turów Mine. We have also successfully made the European Commission join the action before the European Court of Justice, which resulted in an immediate stop to the mining.
Now Poland faces a fine of 35 million EUR, which increases by half a million every day, due to their non-compliance with the ruling. However, we need to note that fines cannot solve anything on their own when they do not affect those who caused the issue. In this case, that means the PGE mining company and the government party, PiS. We are therefore continuing our fight for the Czech landscape and environment. In the upcoming year, I will keep working on ensuring that the Commission and the Court of Justice enforce the ban on mining in Turów.
As a Greens / EFA group member, I also supported the EU’s commitment to climate neutrality by 2050, including the milestone of lowering emissions by 55 % (compared to the 1990 levels) by 2030. I strive to make sure this decarbonisation is transparent and in line with scientific evidence (rather than the political ambition of miners and their allies in various governments). I think these necessary changes must remain socially just. An example of this is the new European Just Transition Fund, and we made sure it would fund services and innovations that have a clear impact on households.
It is crucial that SMEs can benefit from it since they are who the Fund should help the most. I am currently trying to promote this in the Czech approach – even though our authorities have been trying to make the exact opposite happen, giving almost nothing to people in coal regions and instead supporting large mining giants or shady companies with suspicious connections.
I have been trying to inform the Czech public about the EU’s environmental policy systematically and thoroughly because decarbonisation-related topics are still “new” in the Czech media. The abundance of information means there are often many misunderstandings and simplifications. That is why this year, I started making a new podcast called Growth with a Clear Conscience. Its goal is to give a human face to scientific debates on the environment and sustainability. I would like it to mitigate the information deficit in the Czech debate. That was clearly shown in the former Czech PM’s speech at the COP 26 in Glasgow. At that time, literally, the whole world was talking about how to prevent the horrible effects of climate change on everything – people, states, nations, the ground under our feet, the nature – while Mr Babiš criticised the European Commission for emission allowances because he was unhappy that the chemical companies from his holding had to pay for them.
I am glad that I can see my work has tangible results. Whether it is promoting interoperability into the DSA proposal, which will have major effects on the digital world in the long run, or the Covid Pass, which makes Europeans’ lives easier every day.
Thank you for your support, and I hope you start off 2022 on the right foot.
0 comments on “2021 has ended. What were we working on, and what did we achieve?”