Got this email today, Degs xx
Dear friends,
Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, did not miss out on the opportunity to accept the Stop TTIP ECI signatures during a handover action in Berlin. He was clearly impressed by the large number of signatures (for the record: 3,284,289!!) and made two promises: First, he wants to personally ask the European Parliament's Petition Committee to assess whether the Stop TTIP ECI will be given a public hearing in the European Parliament. Secondly, he referred to the EU-Canada agreement CETA in its current form as problematic and called on the European Commission to begin renegotiations with Canada's new government.
We will remind president Schulz of his words and insist that CETA must not be ratified. Currently the agreement is going through a process called 'legal scrubbing' and once that's done it will be translated into all official EU languages. Its ratification on EU level is likely to start in the course of next year. Afterwards, probably all EU member state will need to individually approve it, too. So we still have lots of time to make our disagreement known and prevent CETA's conclusion! Meanwhile the TTIP negotiations are slow to progress, which is also a sign of the success of our growing movement.
Here you can find a nice video from the signature handover to Martin Schulz.
Now that we handed the Stop TTIP signatures to the European Commission and the European Parliament, we are preparing to submit our signatures to the European Council of Trade Ministers dealing with trade issues. After all, these three institutions are responsible for the conclusion of TTIP and CETA and they should not be able to ever claim that they never heard anything about opposition from EU citizens! What's more in some EU Member States, we also plan handovers to the respective governments or parliaments. We are going to keep the pressure on and have many ideas how to stop TTIP and CETA. Stay tuned!
Best wishes,
Your Stop TTIP campaign team
(Michael Efler, Stephanie Roth and Cornelia Reetz)
No.10/2015
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