EU treaty hits yet more obstacles

By Lorne Cook

The European Union's long-awaited reform treaty has come under threat from Czech doubts and a sudden legal hurdle in Britain, just a week after it was rejected outright in Ireland.

Read more: EU treaty hits yet more obstacles

EU Treaty: Judge tells Gordon to delay ratification

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Britain Ratifies EU Treaty

Britain's Parliament Ratifies EU Treaty Despite Irish Rejection
Voice of America
- Jun 19, 2008
By VOA News

Britain's parliament has ratified the European Union treaty despite Ireland's rejection of the document last week. British Prime Minister Gordon ...

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Royal assent for EU treaty

Czechs put ratifying of EU: The treaty cannot take force until all EU states approve it and there are signs that the Irish government will come under pressure to call a second referendum.

EU Leaders Tinker With Treaty as Soaring Prices Spur Protests In the EU's high councils, Czech President Vaclav Klaus wants to declare the treaty dead. German Foreign Minister Frank- Walter Steinmeier sees the rest of Europe moving ahead without Ireland. Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn expects the Irish to vote again -- this time, ``yes.''

clipped from Google - 6/2008

Brown is preparing to break the law over Ireland’s EU vote

The last three years have shown that the Lisbon Treaty is not necessary to carry out EU business. The machine has kept going just as before. It copes fine with 27 states.

(This is of course no surprise to those of us who witnessed the original drafting of this treaty - then the Constitution - and know perfectly well that it has almost nothing to do with “streamlining” the EU institutions, let alone removing the EU from the “nooks and crannies” of national life as originally proclaimed in the Laeken Declaration.

It was an attempt to lock in the structure of a European state - giving the Court of Justice vastly increased powers - before the new countries arrived from Eastern Europe, making any such gambit impossible.

The Brussels integrationist knew it was their last chance. They rolled the dice and lost when the French and the Dutch said no. They rolled again with Lisbon, and lost again last week. Now they are playing seriously dirty).

If the intentions were honest, the EU could simply accept the Irish verdict, recognise that this is not a useful exercise, and ditch the treaty. Almost none of the 500m million citizens would shed a tear. Life would go on.

Instead, Brussels, Paris, Berlin - and London, I am ashamed to say - are pressing ahead with reckless arrogance and stupidity.The markets may not have reacted yet to Ireland’s NO but the actions of the EU-elite are opening the way for a political showdown that will indeed have financial consequences.

As Italy’s finance minister said over the weekend, Europe risks degenerating into “fascism” in the next economic downturn. Indeed it does. Its actions over Ireland already smack of fascism...

Full article: Brown is preparing to break the law over Ireland’s EU vote
By Chris Brown
This was taken from the Blog site of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, though much of the content could have been written by one of our own. At long last its beginning to look as if people are waking up to the reality that is the EU! ...The British National Party News... - http://www.bnp.org.uk

Other items of note on this subject :
Majority Of UK Voters Want EU treaty dropped
Czech president must sign EU treaty approved by parliament

Burning Issue: Should the EU's Lisbon treaty be scrapped after Ireland voted No?

Yes

IAN HUDGHTON, SNP leader in the European Parliament

SHOULD the Lisbon treaty be torn up? The legal reality is that it has to be! Under the existing rulebook, EU treaty changes can only be approved by unanimity among member states. That principle exists for very good reasons – to ensure that no member state, however large or small, can be forced to accept fundamental changes against its will...

No

DAVID MARTIN, Labour MEP for Scotland

WHILE the No campaign was a broad coalition of contradictory interests, the result of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon treaty should be respected. The No vote has certainly complicated the process of updating the EU's institutional arrangement, but to throw out all of its positive aspects would be ignoring the driving concepts of institutional reform: to improve the union's ability to effectively address global issues and fully involve its citizens...

Full article:
Burning Issue: Should the EU's Lisbon treaty be scrapped after Ireland voted No?

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The Lisbon treaty and raising Lazarus
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Where now for Europe?

The Irish ‘no’ in the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty has driven Europe into its next major crisis only three years after the French and Dutch rejected the Constitutional Treaty.

...instead of more attempts to maintain the same level of integration across the whole membership, it may be time to seriously contemplate the creation of a structured ‘multi-speed’ European integration process.

In some respects, this ‘multi-speed’ Europe already exists. For instance not all member states are signatories of the Schengen agreement, that...

The emergence of a ‘core Europe’ – with other countries at the fringes - might reinvigorate the integration process that has been bleeding dynamism for years. This is a very difficult task but it might be more promising than the alternative: muddling through without being able to resolve the underlying conflict of competing, and maybe even incompatible, European visions.

A ‘multi-speed’ Europe is certainly not the best solution but it may be the most feasible.

Full article: Where now for Europe?

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No camp insists victory is not a eurosceptic message
Brussels faces the mother of all political crises
The centre of gravity in Brussels shifted

EU treaty: What next

Even before the official result had been declared, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, announced that the Lisbon Treaty was not dead and that ratification would continue. One by one, the various national leaders put out statements to the same effect.

"It is not truly democratic that less than a million people should decide the fate of half a billion Europeans", said the leader of the Euro-Greens, Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

Well, then, how about allowing the others to hold referendums, too? This, of course, is the last thing that the EU wants. Its leaders now understand that they cannot win anywhere.

How, then, can they keep their constitution? First, they will push through as much as they can under the existing dispensation.

To a large degree this has already happened. Many of the institutions that would have been created by the constitution have already been established in anticipation of a "Yes" vote: the Human Rights Agency, the External Borders Agency, the Defence Agency.

When asked what legal base these bodies have, Eurocrats point to a flimsy cat's cradle of commission communiqués and council resolutions. The question naturally arises: if they already had the authority to create these institutions, why did they need to write them into the Lisbon Treaty?

But that question will ultimately be answered by the European Court of Justice, which rarely lets the letter of the law stand in the way of deeper union.

About 85 per cent of the treaty can be pushed through this way. I can think of only three aspects of the treaty that cannot be secured through lawyerly creativity: the European president; the new representation levels in the commission and council; and "legal personality" for the EU – that is, the right to sign treaties as a sovereign state.

This last looks like being the sole casualty of the Irish "No". The other two will be agreed at an intergovernmental conference next year.

Ireland will be told that, since this is a rearrangement of the existing institutions, and not a transfer of power from the nations to Brussels, there is no need for a plebiscite. And so, two years from now, we will have 99 per cent of the constitution. But there will not be any more referendums. The people have forfeited their leaders' confidence.

Daniel Hannan is a Conservative Euro-MP

Read full article: EU treaty: What next

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Luxemburg PM, veteran EU Dealmaker forcasts the emergence of a two-speed Europe

France urges pursuing EU treaty

But Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, a veteran EU deal-maker, was downbeat, forecasting the emergence of a two-speed Europe in which a small grouping of EU states would develop policy initiatives by themselves.

"Given that it is increasingly hard to get all states moving together, probably the only thing left is a 'Club of the Few,' " said Juncker, who is a contender for the powerful EU president post to be formed under the treaty.

Read more:

Brown left sweating over EU treaty: analysts
LONDON (AFP) —

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been left with a big headache over the government's plans to ratify a key European Union reform treaty following its rejection by Irish voters in a referendum.

Opponents demanding a popular vote on the Lisbon Treaty here said that Ireland's "no" vote on the document meant Brown should now relent and call a referendum...

Gordon Brown would have been home and dry if Ireland had voted 'yes'," he told AFP.
"The treaty would have gone through in Ireland and then in Britain. The question now is whether Brown is going to press ahead with ratifying it and look totally arrogant?"

Full article: Brown left sweating over EU

EU tries to isolate Irish after treaty rejection

Ministers insist other countries must ratify deal despite Ireland's 'no' vote

Ian Traynor in Brussels and Henry McDonald in Dublin
The Observer,
Sunday June 15 2008

EU tries to isolate Irish after

Germany and France moved to isolate Ireland in the European Union yesterday, scrambling for ways to resuscitate the Lisbon Treaty a day after the Irish dealt the architects of the EU's new regime a crushing blow.

Refusing to take Ireland's 'no' for an answer, politicians in Berlin and Paris prepared for a crucial EU summit in Brussels this week by trying to ringfence the Irish while demanding that the treaty be ratified by the rest of the EU.

The scene is now set for a major clash between the Irish and their European partners after a Dublin minister and sources in the ruling Fianna Fail party ruled out any chance of a second Irish referendum on the treaty.

Integration minister Conor Lenihan said this weekend that it was unlikely the treaty would be put to the Republic's electorate again. Meanwhile, senior strategists in Fianna Fail said it would be 'politically impossible' for them to try to repeat what happened in 2001-02, when Ireland first rejected the Nice Treaty but then held a second poll which voted in favour of it 12 months later.

'This time around, the turnout was high, so there can be no justification for it. The government is caught in a political trap. There are local as well as European elections in Ireland next year and Fianna Fail will not risk having to hold another referendum. Within the next 12 months at the very least, there is absolutely no chance that Ireland will re-run Lisbon,' one senior Fianna Fail source said.

Jim Murphy, the government's Europe minister, warned that Ireland could find itself isolated. 'The Irish government need to come to the European Council meeting this week to tell us, the UK and other governments in the European Union how they think we should be taking this forward based on the sovereign decision of the Irish people,' he said.

The Tories said that after the rejection of the treaty's forerunner - the now abandoned EU constitution - by French and Dutch voters in 2005, EU leaders should finally accept that their blueprint for reform was dead. Shadow foreign secretary William Hague said: 'It is time to turn away from this whole centralising project and concentrate on things that really matter.'

However France's Europe minister, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, said a search was on for a way to accommodate the Irish verdict without derailing plans to implement the treaty that aims to change how the EU is run and gives the Union its first sitting president and foreign minister.
The Franco-German plan is to get all 27 EU states to ratify the treaty as soon as possible, to quarantine the Irish and then come up with some legal manoeuvre enabling the treaty to go ahead.

It is not clear yet how or if this will succeed. 'The legal situation is clear,' said a European Commission official. 'Unless the treaty is ratified by all, there is no treaty.'

Jouyet said that 'specific means of co-operation' could be invoked to deal with Ireland. 'The most important thing is that the ratification process must continue in the other countries, and then we shall see with the Irish what type of legal arrangement could be found.'

'We're sticking firmly to our goal of putting this treaty into effect,' said the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. 'So the process of ratification must continue.'
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who devoted most of last year to getting the EU's members to agree on the Lisbon Treaty after the failure of the EU's proposed new constitution in 2005, said: 'We must carry on.'

The Franco-German refusal to countenance defeat may run into opposition in Scandinavia and eastern Europe, while David Cameron's Conservatives will continue to pound Gordon Brown over his refusal to stage a referendum.

This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday June 15 2008 on p4 of the News section. It was last updated at 00:11 on June 15 2008.