European Blind Union: 18 months and counting – EU undecided on ratifying Marrakech Treaty, as blind people miss out on reading books
The European Blind Union, its friends in the World Blind Union and many other organisations campaigned hard for years to get agreement on a treaty at the World Intellectual Property Organisation, WIPO. The campaign succeeded, against the odds, in June 2013, when the Marrakech Treaty was agreed.
The Marrakech Treaty will help remove some of the unnecessary barriers visually impaired people face due to the ‘book famine’, in which only some 5-10% of books published are accessible in richer countries, and around 1% in developing countries where 90% of the world’s visually impaired people live.
However, for blind people and their organisations to use the Treaty, it first needs to be ratified.
EBU is dismayed to say that 18 months after Marrakech, the EU is still only at the stage of deliberating the legal process by which it might ratify it.
Why is this? Here is a simple explanation. In October 2014 the Commission formally proposed to ratify the treaty on behalf of itself and all the 28 EU Member States. If member states agreed to this proposal, EU ratification could follow swiftly. That way, accessible books in France could soon be sent to French speakers in Haiti, or from the UK to Kenya, or Spain to Nicaragua, for example.
However, EBU has heard that member states are questioning the right of the European Commission to ratify the treaty on their behalf. EU member states appear to be saying that both the Commission and they should jointly ratify. EBU understands that such a process would take many years to complete, and that no EU blind organisation or individual could use the treaty until that process was complete and all 28 member states had ratified.
All that said, EBU is not partisan in discussions on what the EU jargon calls ‘competence’ (i.e. who is in charge on a given policy issue- the Commission, the Member States or both). EBU wants the EU to ratify and fully implement the treaty without further delay: blind and visually impaired persons have been waiting too long already to end the book famine.
On 2 December in the European Parliament, EBU expressed its frustration at this delay at a meeting organised by the EBU, WBU, Knowledge Ecology International-Europe and the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue.
