Constitution - the future
On 13 December 2007 the European summit in Lisbon agreed on the Lisbon Treaty to replace the rejected 2004 EU Constitution. Like the rejected Constitution, the new treaty contains 106 new EU competencies. It also includes 68 new areas falling under a qualified majority vote. There was also 68 new areas of qualified majority voting in the rejected 2004 version. There are no changes in legal obligations. Only the presentation is different.
In this ABC we leave it to the readers to judge whether it is a constitution or not. But it is certainly a revised constitution since the content is mainly identical. The Lisbon Treaty will have more than 3000 pages compared to the 560 pages in the rejected Constitution.
The reason is that the new treaty spread the content from the 560 pages in the existing 17 treaties with 2800 pages of constitutional law. The original constitution simplified the 2800 pages with the amendments into one single text.
The Lisbon Treaty has been negotiated in a so-called intergovernmental conference with ministers and civil servants from every member state government plus 3 representatives from the European Parliament.
The negotiations have been held in secret, not allowing members of the European Parliament or the national parliaments to follow the negotiations or even see the documents when they were negotiated. T
he IGC commenced under the Portuguese presidency on 23 July 2007 and had been prepared under German presidency (January - June 2007). On 23 June 2007 a summit in Brussels agreed on a 273-page negotiations draft mandate which were then implemented as concrete new articles to be inserted in the existing 17 treaties.
The reactivation of the Constitutional process was decided in the Berlin Declaration on 25 March 2007, when prime ministers and heads of states celebrated the 50th birthday of the 1957 Rome treaties.
The reactivation of the Constitutional process was decided in the Berlin Declaration on 25 March 2007, when prime ministers and heads of states celebrated the 50th birthday of the 1957 Rome treaties.
Notes
In June 2006, an EU summit had decided to go forward with the proposal for an EU Constitution. The summit had agreed on a ‘two-track approach’ after the first year’s period of reflection on the future of Europe. The period of reflection had been declared at a summit in Brussels in June 2005 after the French and Dutch rejection of the EU Constitution in the referendums on 29 May and 1 June 2005. On one track, the period of reflection and the ratification process, currently then in progress, would continue. Finland announced that it had launched the debate in the Finnish Parliament and ratified the Constitution before the end of the Finnish Presidency on 31 December 2006. Finland became the 16th country to ratify the Constitution. The aim was to get 20 countries (4/5) to ratify, as required by Declaration 30 of the Constitutional Treaty, and then put pressure on the remaining five countries. In January 2007, Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU. This meant that only 18 out of 27 countries had approved the rejected Constitution. The second track was to seek to implement proposals in the draft Constitution as concrete proposals on the basis of the Treaty of Nice, which is still in force. On this track, important proposals from the Constitution were already being made effective. The European Defence Agency, for example, was set up in June 2004.
On 13 March 2006 the Court of Justice made it possible for the EU in future to adopt criminal law provisions by majority decision in the supranational pillar. On 21 March 2006 the Court of Justice made it possible for supranational decisions in the intergovernmental pillar to be taken on judicial policy. The Constitution has also used the Charter of Fundamental Rights which will be legally binding in the Lisbon Treaty, Art. 6 TEU.
After the rejection of the EU Constitution, the inter-group SOS Democracy in the European Parliament, the young federalists in the UEF and Democracy International had asked for a new directly-elected convention to be convened and to draft proposals which can be put to a referendum on the same day in all the EU Member States. SOS Democracy wants voters to say whether they want a democratic constitution for a stronger EU or a less far-reaching cooperation agreement between independent democracies.
Prime Ministers made a political agreement to avoid referendums. The Danish prime Minister was applauded in the European Council when he informed his colleagues he had avoided a referendum.
Ireland is the only country to adopt - or reject - the Lisbon Treaty by referendum 12 june 2008.
Links
The main stages in the institutional reform of the European Union http://europa.eu/institutional_reform/index_en.htm
The history of the European Constitution http://www.unizar.es/euroconst......cion/Treaties/Treaty_Const.htm
The Future of the EU Constitution: Escaping the Ratification Maze http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/for......f-eu-constitution-escaping.php
See also EU Constitution
Read about the transition of the Constitution into the Lisbon Treaty here.
