[Vexx]

Mexican Senate Unanimously Votes To Remove Mexico From ACTA Negotations
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...otations.shtml

With the news that the EU Parliament is not happy with ACTA and threatening to reject it, now comes the news (via Jamie Love) that the Mexican Senate has voted unanimously to withdraw from ACTA negotiations. You can read the full resolution here (Google translation from the original Spanish). The resolution points out that access to information is a key point in helping to build a modern, information-based nation, and ACTA is about removing access to information and knowledge. They're not against ACTA entirely, but think that the process needs to be a lot more open and involve a lot more stakeholders, and say they won't agree to ACTA unless the process includes a much larger group in the discussions:

The Senator proposed to create a mixed analysis group consisting of experts, academics, corporations and members of the public that will analyze the current text of the agreement

Of course, it's not clear exactly how much say the Mexican Senate has here. While the resolution claims that it needs to ratify any such agreements, I don't know if that's the case. In the US, for example, the administration will avoid needing Senate approval (which it needs for treaties) by designating it as an "executive agreement" instead of a "treaty." Of course, if you talk to legal scholars, they point out that the only real difference is that an executive agreement doesn't need to be approved by the Senate. I have no idea if Mexico has a similar setup. Also, this is just a "non-binding resolution," so may not mean much in the long run. However, it is nice to see that some actual politicians are equally disturbed over how the ACTA negotiations took place and the fact that some final agreement is just being dumped on politicians at the last minute.