2004-12-21 German Green Minister of Agriculture Evading Council Vote (?)
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*Berlin, 21st of December 2004* -- FFII received reports by well-informed sources in Berlin that on the eve of the software patent vote in the EU Agricultural Council the german minister who was scheduled to attend, Ms Renate Künast, declined to attend the session and passed the ball on to the ambassador of Germany at the EU, Dr. Peter Witt. These rumors have meanwhile been confirmed by the ministry.
The German representative office in Brussels is said to be directly subordinate not to the foreign ministry of Joschka Fischer (another green) but to the chancellery office, and Witt is expected to agree to the proposed text.
From conversations we learned that the minister was in difficulty. Squeezed in between pressure from the member base of the Green Party and the European colleagues on the one hand and the German ministry of justicy and chancellery office on the other, Künast may have had little choice.
The ministry was confronted with pressure by the justice ministry, which again was backed by the chancellery office. The Ministry of Justice pointed to an intra-ministerial agreement of April, which itself has been spectacularly violated by last-minute manoevering at the session in May.
See more in the German version.
Lebenslauf Dr. Peter Witt -- Judging from to this German curriculum vitae, Mr. Witt's level of expertise in questions of agriculture approximately matches that in software
EU-Vertretung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland -- EU representation of the Federal Republic of Germany, said to be subordinate to the chancellery office (Schröder) rather than to the foreign ministry (Fischer).
Update
At a later date, Künast's minsistry sent cynical letters to those concerned about the Council's software patent text, telling them the mother of all lies, i.e. that this text didn't and wasn't intended to make software patentable. This deepened the disillusionment of the software world with the Berlin Greens.