> Then the US Congress passed the PATRIOT Act in haste, and broke everything. It took years to sketch out a way to make these incompatible laws work together, sort of. Grey areas were swept under the carpet, in hope that particular circumstances they covered "would never happen". Now they are happening, due to a combination of factors (the emergence of cloud computing, NSA revelations, differences in foreign policy stances, etc).
This is what judges are always complaining about. Congress/parliament wants to look good and votes stuff in with utter disregard to the legal implications and how it interacts with other laws.
There is still a big fight in EU law about equality between men and women interaction with divorce proceedings (you can imagine how long this has been going on). Before the equality vote is was okay to treat women differently when it comes to infidelity. Why ? Because in practice, offspring resulting from infidelity has rights (ie. inheritance + money) from both partners in a marriage. If a man has extramarital offspring, he can choose to not be known and he can choose not to be the legal parent. But men and women are equal, it's in the law.
So ... what do we do ?
a) can women deny legal parentage for kids (this would be a disaster for those kids) after giving birth ? The answer is no. Men, of course, can do this for obvious reasons.
b) will we force natural parentage to be registered ? (problem here is, of course, that in many cases it's simply not known. And if the woman doesn't know, gets it wrong (unintentionally or otherwise) or isn't talking, what are you going to do ?)
c) do you revise legal parentage during divorce proceedings (again, in many cases a disaster for the kids)
For obvious reasons, parliaments are not touching this with a 10-foot pole.
> In this case, EU data-privacy laws emerged as a way to harmonize EU trade and law enforcement practices. They were then made compatible with US laws through various international agreements and treaties. Things were working, more or less.
I wonder why this even needs to be stated, but of course EU privacy laws do not protect against search and seizure as part of a criminal investigation.
Criminal investigations in the USA have obviously no legal standing in the EU. What the US would have to do in that case would be to contact European law enforcement and ask them to help them.
Which they wouldn't do, because what they would ask would be against the law.
This is what judges are always complaining about. Congress/parliament wants to look good and votes stuff in with utter disregard to the legal implications and how it interacts with other laws.
There is still a big fight in EU law about equality between men and women interaction with divorce proceedings (you can imagine how long this has been going on). Before the equality vote is was okay to treat women differently when it comes to infidelity. Why ? Because in practice, offspring resulting from infidelity has rights (ie. inheritance + money) from both partners in a marriage. If a man has extramarital offspring, he can choose to not be known and he can choose not to be the legal parent. But men and women are equal, it's in the law.
So ... what do we do ?
a) can women deny legal parentage for kids (this would be a disaster for those kids) after giving birth ? The answer is no. Men, of course, can do this for obvious reasons.
b) will we force natural parentage to be registered ? (problem here is, of course, that in many cases it's simply not known. And if the woman doesn't know, gets it wrong (unintentionally or otherwise) or isn't talking, what are you going to do ?)
c) do you revise legal parentage during divorce proceedings (again, in many cases a disaster for the kids)
For obvious reasons, parliaments are not touching this with a 10-foot pole.
> In this case, EU data-privacy laws emerged as a way to harmonize EU trade and law enforcement practices. They were then made compatible with US laws through various international agreements and treaties. Things were working, more or less.
I wonder why this even needs to be stated, but of course EU privacy laws do not protect against search and seizure as part of a criminal investigation.