Dear Mr García Morán,

Our offices at the European Parliament have been working to actively engage European citizens in the consultation procedures of the European Commission, through links and instructions on how to use the IPM consultation tool currently used by the Commission.

However, citizens despair when they encounter technical problems that stop them from participating in this process.

Among the complaints sent to us are:

* Those who try to access the consultations through VPN-tunnels or TOR-networks are summarily blocked from accessing the consultations.

* The gateway server times out when citizens try to access a survey link that was provided to them from the European Commission.

* The procedure for getting access to some consultation surveys is unnecessarily complex. In one instance, citizens had to write to the European Commission and request that a link was sent to them from the unit responsible for the consultation. After the link was transmitted to the citizen, manually, by the person responsible for that survey in the unit, it often ended up in the spam inbox of the citizens email account. The consultation was further only made available in English, which caused a problem for some of the citizens we were in touch with that speak French and German.

The two consultations we have been working with are the public consultation on trade secrets and the public consultation on civil enforcement of intellectual property rights. The VPN and TOR-blocking complaints apply to both these studies. The time-out problem and the limited accessibility of the survey, however, applies only to the public consultation on civil enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Are you able to clarify that you are undertaking measures to ensure that these arbitrary hinders to citizen participation in European Commission consultation procedures will not continue?

It is of high relevance to us that the Commission acts speedily on these unnecessary technical roadblocks to transparency and inclusion, and we are looking forward to your response.

Thank you for your attention.

Best regards,

Amelia Andersdotter

Nathalie Griesbeck

Marietje Schaake

Pawel Zalewski

Members of the European Parliament

Vi emottog senare under dagen detta svar:

Dear Mrs Andersdotter

Thank you very much for your mail.

I will certainly look into the issues you mentioned as a matter of urgency but in order to be able to better identify the issues you mention in your mail particularly your reference to

The gateway server times out when citizens try to access a survey link that was provided to them from the European Commission.

We would need specific examples where the participants in the consultation found the problem. We run hundreds of consultation with the software per year and according to our records it is seldom that the platform blocks.

The issue of the VPN and TOR are a different issue and it is, probably, related to prevention of attacks. My Directorate General implements the security policy decided by the Commission, we do not issue them. I will therefore forward this issue to the service responsible for it in order to have from them a position.

I will keep you informed on progress

Detta svar visar att det är mycket viktigt att man felanmäler så fort det uppstår ett trassligt eller omotiverat tekniskt problem med att svara på konsultationerna! Om du är en av de modiga privatpersoner som använt våra svarsguider (se IPRED-konsultationen och Affärshemlighetskonsultationen !), och du har upplevt ett fel, skriv till kommissionen och berätta om det här: http://ec.europa.eu/yourvoice/contact/index_en.htm

Då kan vi i Europaparlamentet hjälpa till att göra ditt och alla medborgares liv tekniskt enklare!