It's a receipt from a cafe. Get over it.

Should people jailed years ago for smoking/selling marijuana be kept in jail after marijuana becomes legal in a country?

To be a comparable analogy, it would have to be the flip of that. Where we decide to remove the right to smoke mj and then prosecute past users. A real world example would be in the US where the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade then started prosecutions of those who had abortions before the overturn.

Anyway, the ethics aren’t so interesting to discuss. I am just looking for info about how to counter the EU refusing to protect a liberty because (the Commission hopes) we might lose the liberty in the future anyway.

(edit) well, I should say I don’t mean to dismiss the ethical discussion. I don’t suppose it’s realistic to expect a law expert to bring insight here anyway.

In the US they revised sentences of drug offenders because you had situations like a black man doing 20 years for posession of a joint. And while they were doing absurd amounts of time, the policy got smarter (more lenient). Then at the same time prisons were ram-packed with those who had minor drug offenses and there was also a need to free up their rooms because they could not build prisons fast enough. So if they were to decide /not/ to revise sentences to match modern leniency, that would have been reckless for a number of reasons. It makes sense to prioritise the prison space for offenders who are most needed off the street.

Let me play the devil's advocate here :

Should people jailed years ago for smoking/selling marijuana be kept in jail after marijuana becomes legal in a country?

The same could be said about change in statute of limitation "There was a 20 years statute of limitation when I killed/raped someone 25 years ago, surely you can't remove it now and charge me?"

I don't know the specifics of your scenario and I tend to agree with you that the law in place at the time of the infraction should be enforced, especially if the laws that invalidate it are vague future one... But everything legal has so much ramifications that sometimes it's hard to figure out.

That being said I am not a lawyer and not part of the EU (yet?) so don't take anything I say seriously. It's just two examples that came to mind when I read your post.

I wonder if other countries have similsr laws nobody cares about?

I feel like there's a Douglas Adams joke in there somewhere.

In the end we need an easily readable PDF with bookmarks (aka contents sidebar). I suppose in git it would be a markdown or LaTeX doc which can then be compiled into something civilians can handle.

I have no idea what chaos it must be for the EU to write law in 15+ different languages.

Lawmakers should literally use git. Not 'redlined' pdfs, not 'track changes' in MS Word, literally git.

Which country do you have experience with?

International rail and bus lines have this problem. They have price X for online tickets, and price X+Y (where Y>0 and often Y>X) for cash payers. Flixbus (Germany) and OUIGO (France) both do this.

Some countries force payments by bank transfer. The only way to make such a payment with cash is to hire the post office, who charges a fee. Indeed you cannot even pay your tax in cash in some countries without paying an extra fee.

The cheapest Internet subscription offer often mandates electronic payment -- even if the ISP has a physical presence. In that case you can only pay cash via the post office, which adds their fee.

I have never encountered a fee for paying in cash in the EU.

Indeed the EU is not worried about marginalising Americans. That is the thesis of the thread. Whether they /should/ give a shit is a separate question. As it stands, there are multinational “accidental Americans” in the EU who have lived in Europe their whole life (with an EU-based nationality). They also get treated as Americans by EU banks despite their other nationality.

Maybe I'm reading too far into this, but I suspect the EU isn't particularly worried about marginalising cash payments from Americans?

Nonsense. This is like comparing the price of rice in China to potatoes in Ireland. Process serving is a legal process with liability. Process serving does not allow for dropping a slip in a box and waiting for the served to come to your office and stand in line at the convenience of the process server. Process servers must be resilient to track down a human, who may rarely be home. There is no lax rule of just waiting 2 weeks for the served person to appear and sending it back.

(edit) A registered letter can also be refused. Which amounts to a simple tickbox and returned letter.

BTW, this is not to say process serving is not also overpriced. But process serving /should/ cost much more than registered letter.

(edit 2) Process serving can turn into a man hunt. I’ve seen process servers dig around like private investigators to find out where someone hangs out, in order to track them down and get papers in front of them. And when it all fails, a process server has to publish the circumstance in a local newspaper to then be able to argue in court that the served had an opportunity to become informed that way.

complains that email is unreliable and mail is too expensive

wants deliveroo to take over registered mail delivery

Nope. Nope, nope, nope.

If you think €10 is a lot, find out what it costs to serve someone.

Email delivery has never been designed to be reliable.

Indeed, not inherently. Though it /can/ be reliable only if sent a certain way. Sender emails a “digital notary” service and puts the ultimate destination in a separate header. The digital notary forwards the msg, timestamps it, signs it, and includes the sig of the previously sent transmission (to create a verfiable chain). A service called the UK Timestamper demonstrates this. It proves posting but not reception. There is a RFC (documented open standard) for read receipts whereby the recipient sends a signal when they open the msg. Of course it’s voluntary and relies on a willing recipient.

In the end, Belgium simply declares that a simple email serves as a registered letter.

Your situation, of course, is one you have created entirely by your choice and typically email delivery is very reliable - but the technological underpinnings absolutely are not.

My situation proves how catastrophic it is to presume reliability. I conciously traded off reliability in exchange for privacy (of a certain kind), control, and malice detection. Though I have no way of knowing how much reliability I am trading. Blackholing is borne out of incompetent design. Delivery cannot be guaranteed but a delivery failure should be signaled to one party or the other.

€10 for a registered mail is not extortionate. It is a reasonable price for the service, which also serves the necessary low barrier that prevents abuse.

It’s absurdly extortionate. It first requires prior class. Prior class within Belgium is more than sending prior from Germany to anywhere in the EU. Then they are charging an additional ~€7 just to collect a sig. The postal workers are quick to insert a slip into the mailbox that forces the recipient to go to the post office and wait in line. It’s very streamlined and convenient (for them, not us). In some cases they don’t even bother buzz the doorbell.. just drop off the slip with the rest of the mail.

If DIGI comes around to drill into your façade to add another cable, you then have a legal obligation to send DIGI a registered letter every time you renovate your facade in the area of the cables. If you have 8 cables attached to your house, that’s a cost of ~€80.

There is an easy opportunity here for a company like Deliveroo to expand and undercut them.

We haven’t solved the problem of phishing, which makes this a very dangerous scenario.

Email delivery has never been designed to be reliable. It is utterly absurd to suggest email should be a substitute for registered mail, but unfortunately laws aren’t written by technologically competent individuals. Your situation, of course, is one you have created entirely by your choice and typically email delivery is very reliable - but the technological underpinnings absolutely are not.

€10 for a registered mail is not extortionate. It is a reasonable price for the service, which also serves the necessary low barrier that prevents abuse.

The place to complain -- only if you are willing to solve CAPTCHAs:

https://survey.alchemer.eu/s3/90510992/en

I don’t do CAPTCHAs.

Indeed, you lose the convenience of a realtime chat. Which means the conversation will be slow because when they respond in writing it may trigger more questions.

In Brussels we have social interpretters. I’m not sure if they are paid or if they volunteer, but at no cost they send an interpretter to wherever they are needed. They do this for anyone, not just poor people. But there’s a limitation: they are not certified interpretters thus cannot be used in court.

I mention this because perhaps Berlin has something comparable. OTOH, if the legal advice /must/ be in German, it stands to reason that they would also reject non-certified interpretters. Otherwise I don’t understand the purpose of the law. If they would even theoretically allow a friend or anyone arbitrary to help you, it would somewhat defeat the point.

I managed to get an appointment for a consultation on the 14th. But they contacted me to say that they were required to only speak to me in German. So I either had to cancel or bring an interpreter. Machine translating is fine for written, but problematic for real time.

I can understand that a transposition of a directive might be flexible. But in the case at hand, I believe the German translation of the directive was not even true to the intended directive. So it seems some intent was lost before the German transposition was even drafted.

The point of a directive is that it outlines what kind of law should be written in each member state, but each member state has a lot of leeway regarding how they decide to implement the directive.

Then there are another category of EU laws: Regulations. Regulations must be precisely the same in each member state.
But, if what you say is true and it's indeed in a directive instead of a regulation, then the reason is simply that Germany decided to implement the directive in a way that doesn't require ATMs to give receipts.

A directive defines the rough outlines of a law, a regulation is a ready-to-use law that cannot be altered in any manner whatsoever and is automatically valid without parliamentary interference by the member states.

Whenever I have to deal with a French-only gov agency, I give them a bilingual letter with my original English directly next to machine translated French. The machine translation for French is good enough, which is likely the same for German. So the machine translation serves to get the letter past the 1st tier staff who just look for trivial reasons to reject a case. Then having the original English next to it enables the case worker to potentially have a chance at understanding what you mean whenever the machine translation is rough.

Not sure about Germany specifically but worth a try.

How do you want to get in contact with them? Go there in person or via email?

Please contact me via message.

I did contact them actually, but they explicitly state that they do not offer advice in English. My German is not good enough to understand legal advice, and I don't know any one well enough that I can ask to help with it.

Maybe try the Verbraucherzentrale: https://www.verbraucherzentrale-berlin.de/beratung-be

They should be able to give you legal advice.

(update)

It seems all the *.europa.eu sites are blocking Tor across the board now. Even this page is unreachable to Tor users:

https://have-your-say.ec.europa.eu/index_en

It’s a bit embarrassing at the EU level. You might expect a mom/pop shop to be unable to handle Tor users, but the EU (a government of nation states) should have their infosec shit together and have the security competency to serve Tor users.