Model EU Preparation Day 1
It’s Sunday. After the confusion last evening if we should present us in the hotel lobby by 8h or 8:30h, if we would get breakfast or not, it turned out for the best: 8:30h and breakfast provided at the revenue.
I use the unexpected half enough to blog about the arrival and to gather my equipment that I won’t be able to use the other days for security reasons when we are in the European Parliament building.
I’m 5 minutes to late in the then empty lobby and realise that against my intuition there is not even a trace of the ~100 people.
I decide to catch them on the walk to the Cathedral of Strasbourg. Once arrived, I’m still alone. I meet a participant of the Young European Federalists in France seminar, I have attended until yesterday. We have a little chat. I look up the revenue in the schedule. Unfortunately no adress. I remember that our name badges have the number of the head of the local support team on the other side. Unfortunately, we don’t have our batches yet. Finally, I get my phone call to my room mate answered, we exchange the adress and 2 minutes later I’m there. The crowd is still waiting to enter the building – I have not missed anything.
The day is covered with a for-dummies workshop on the regulations we gonna deal with, talks with invited experts of the concerned regulations and a session on how to file amendments and the procedure during the plenary sessions. A little curiosity: The MEPs communicate still with little note papers. Probably not only since the NSA scandal. A bit unconvenient, but probably very secure if you trust your neighbours.
During the talk about the EU Data Protection Regulation, the speaker Juraj Sajfert from the EU comission made a remark concerning the applicability of EU law to internet service hosted outside of the EU. I asked him during the Q&A and after the talk and learned: As long as a web service is accessed from the EU, it has to comply with EU law – even if the service does not adress the EU market. That seems quite unreasonable to me. There might be little content provider (e.g. bloggers) in other countries that are not even aware of the EU!
In the evening, we have dinner and get a guided tour through the city. I have changed my mind since I’ve been last time in November in Strasbourg. There are actually very beautiful corners. Afterwards, I have been in a cosy bar with some fellow MEPs. So far so good.
Tomorrow, we have to be in the lobby by 7h, because the check-in at the European Parliament is supposed to take quite some time.
Good night,
Robert