Examination of Witnesses (Questions 328
- 339)
TUESDAY 8 JANUARY 2008
Mr Jo Leinen, Mr Timothy Kirkhope, Mr Richard Corbett
and Mr Elmar Brok
Q328 Chairman:
I know that two of your colleagues are delayed. We hope we will
see them in due course. May I begin by saying how very happy we
are that we can meet with you. It is very kind of you to take
time. This is probably the largest gathering of this Committee
we have actually had outside Westminster for a very long time
which demonstrates the importance we attach to the Lisbon Treaty
which, as you know, is the subject of an in-depth inquiry by this
Committee and its seven Sub-Committees. We shall present to our
Parliament a reasoned analysis and impact assessment to assist
Parliament when the ratification Bill comes into Parliament. We
now have Elmar Brok and Timothy Kirkhope, thank you very much.
Mr Kirkhope: Sorry we are late.
Q329 Chairman:
You are almost on time, do not worry. The members of the Select
Committee who you see around the table are engaged with me in
an inquiry into the institutional aspects of the Treaty and the
seven Sub-Committees are dealing with the specific issues for
which their Sub-Committees have a mandate. It is quite a big exercise.
We felt it extremely important that we should come and talk with
senior Members of the European Parliament. Colleagues from the
European Parliament, we are happy to see you here. Mr Leinen,
would you like to say a few words to start?
Mr Leinen: Yes. Thank you. My Lord Chairman,
you know us from the many meetings of COSAC. My Lords it is a
real pleasure to have you here and, since it is the start of 2008,
I wish all of you a successful 2008. For the European Union, this
new year will be a success if the Treaty we are talking about
is ratified in 27 Member States. It is a big effort to explain
what the Lisbon Treaty is about, what the goals and objectives
are. I am happy that we are able to have this exchange of views
tonight. You have invited eminent persons from our Constitutional
Committee, Timothy Kirkhope, my Vice-President, Elmar Brok, the
representative in this IGC, as he has been in the last four, so
he has some experience of IGCs, and Richard Corbett, who has written
lots of books and articles and is our rapporteur. We are
drafting a report and in two weeks we are voting on it in committee.
In February we will be voting on it in plenary. This time, we
were not the first Parliament to have an opinion because, as you
know, after five days the Hungarians ratified it. This is a record,
five days after signing. I do not know how they conducted their
debates! They were second on the Constitutional Treaty after Lithuania,
which was quite quick. This year, 2008, is the year of different
cultures and in ratifying you could say you have different cultures
from country to country. I will be short. The basic goal of these
procedures in the six years—after the Treaty of Nice looking
at this big enlargement that never happened and then at the end
12 new Member States—was to make the EU function. Function
means make it effective so that they can made decisions with 27,
make it transparent that this animal in Brussels that nobody understands
is a bit more understandable, make it more democratic and look
for elements of participation directly or indirectly. In my Committee
we have had lots of debate even in the last weeks. We have to
compare the Treaty of Lisbon with what exists, not with what did
not come but what exists. The last Treaty was the Treaty of Nice
and we have to compare the new Treaty with the existing Treaty.
Our analysis has been that there is no one single step backwards
behind the acquis communitaire. There are different steps
forward, some bigger, some smaller, some middle class and this
was compromised among the 27 twice. Knowing that you are experts,
I am looking forward to a very interesting exchange of views.
You are the master of this meeting. We have not had a pre-meeting
amongst ourselves, so those who want to answer will answer and
you will see whether we agree or diversity in unity is a character
in the European Parliament. Thank you for coming and a successful
2008 for all of you.
Q330 Chairman:
Thank you very much, Mr Chairman. That is a very nice introduction.
It might be a good idea that if your rapporteur, Richard
Corbett, has anything he would like to say to start with, he should
do that now, bearing in mind we around the table are pretty familiar
with the content of the Treaty, we have looked at it very closely.
As you will understand, we are very anxious to focus a bit on
the European Parliament itself and what the impact of the Lisbon
Treaty is on the European Parliament, on the national parliaments
and our relationship with the European Parliament, and other issues.
As you indeed suggest, it would be a very good idea if you or
your three colleagues feel like jumping in at any point with comments,
or even questions, about where we stand. I wonder whether you
want to say anything to start with, Mr Corbett?
Mr Corbett: I will accept your invitation to
focus on the specific point of what it changes in terms of parliamentary
scrutiny, perhaps starting with the European Parliament. As I
am sure you know, what we now call the co-decision procedure will
become the normal legislative procedure and apply to virtually
all European legislation. In the few cases where it does not apply,
in many of those there will still be the consent or assent of
the Parliament to an act of the Council or, indeed, the other
way around. We think this is a very important step forward from
the point of view of the European Parliament. It is not actually
the only one. The Parliament will also gain additional powers,
as will the Council, over the Commission when we delegate powers
to the Commission. As you do in your domestic Parliament, when
you confer power on the Executive to adopt Statutory Instruments,
Parliament and Council confer implementing powers occasionally
on the Commission. Where they are of a quasi-legislative nature,
from now on both the Parliament and the Council will be able to
object to a measure which the Commission wishes to adopt, in which
case the Commission will not be able to enact it, they will have
to come up with a new proposal. Furthermore, under the Treaty
the Parliament and the Council both have the right to revoke the
delegation of powers to the Commission at any time. That is something
that has not been commented on much in the debates so far in the
United Kingdom on this Treaty. It is an extra safeguard, if you
like. It is not that either Parliament or Council would wish to
use this every week but it is a safeguard where if we think the
Commission is doing something really silly we can blow the whistle.
When it comes to the ordinary legislative procedure, which people
have commented on, I think this is very important. It shows that
we have two quality controls before any European legislation is
adopted: acceptability to the Council—ministers who are
accountable to their national parliaments—and acceptability
to those directly elected by the electorates to act at the European
level on European issues. These two institutions do not duplicate
each other, they bring different perspectives to bear. The Council
sits in national delegations and focuses on looking and defending
the national interest, rightly so. We sit in political groups
and we have the full diversity of political opinion in the European
Parliament from, shall we say, the far left to the far right.
We have members not just from capital cities but from regions.
We bring pluralism to the European process. Our members are not
just from parties that are in government in each Member State
but those that are in opposition in each Member State. The European
Parliament brings something extra to the scrutiny of European
legislation and perhaps we bring a more political perspective.
When we divide in Europe and have differences of view the media
tend to focus on especially the European Council and portray it
as if it is a sort of gladiatorial combat between countries: did
Britain win today or were we outmanoeuvred by the French getting
together with the Germans or the Dutch and the Italians, or whatever,
as if it is all a zero sum game. But when those same subjects,
come before the European Parliament, it is unusual to see all
the members of one country voting one way and all the members
from another country voting another way because we divide politically
and, if you think about it, in many cases that is a more realistic
way of looking at it. In the choices we face, do you want higher
environmental standards but at greater cost to industry, for instance,
there will be people on both sides of that argument in every Member
State, it is not that everyone in one country thinks one thing
and everyone in another country thinks another. To take a topical
example, the revision of the Working Time Directive, we have trade
unions from every country coming and saying, "We need this
tightened up" and representatives from small and medium-sized
enterprises from every Member State saying, "No, we want
a more flexible labour market". Those are policy choices,
political choices, which will have people on all sides of the
argument in every country. That is reflected in the Parliament,
it is hidden away in the Council. That is why I think enhancing
the role of the Parliament is something that brings added value
to the scrutiny of European legislation. It is an extra safeguard.
It does not take away the fact that European legislation must
have the approval of the Council of Ministers but it adds on this
extra dimension of more pluralism, different perspectives being
brought to bear, more scrutiny and extra scrutiny, and that ties
in nicely with the extra possibilities given to national parliaments
by the Treaty. I am speaking personally here. I do not think the
orange card and yellow card in practice will be the most important
breakthrough, they will rather be safeguards which you can use
where necessary. The Finnish Parliament has had a subsidiarity
control mechanism since they joined and I think they have only
found one case where they felt that a Commission proposal violated
the principle of subsidiarity. In practice, you will not need
to use that very often but it is there, it is an important safeguard.
Where I think the Treaty will change things for national parliaments
is that this eight week period and whole process is a real encouragement
to national parliaments to help shape the position taken by the
minister representing their country before he or she goes off
to Brussels and not just hear about it afterwards. If you are
to seize that opportunity, perhaps looking at what the Nordic
parliaments do in this respect, you will have a powerful new instrument
for national parliaments to get involved in the shaping of European
legislation via helping to shape the position that the minister
representing their country will take. Globally that gives us a
system which, frankly, is something we should be proud of. Our
European Union will be more democratic than any other international
structure in the world: the World Trade Organisation, the IMF,
the World Bank, NATO, OECD, you name it. Nothing has that level
of parliamentary scrutiny from national parliaments and the purpose-built
European Parliament at that level. It is not a perfect system,
nothing ever is when you get that distant from people, and we
are distant, we recognise that, that is one reason why we do not
want to do things at European level that can be done perfectly
well at national or local level. But we do do some things jointly
in Europe, let us get it right and democratic, and this Treaty
will help us do that. I will not address any other aspect of the
Treaty, I will just leave it at that. Thank you.
Q331 Chairman:
Thank you very much indeed. In a moment the Committee would very
much like to hear from you what your views are about the UK Government
red lines. Just before we leave the question of the orange and
yellow cards, there is a suggestion that they are pointing at
the wrong target because it has been suggested that subsidiarity
is more often violated not by EU primary legislation but in the
comitology process. I wonder whether you agree that, in fact,
we are looking at the wrong target when we are looking at the
primary legislation?
Mr Corbett: I would not say that comitology
is necessarily the culprit because the Commission's powers under
comitology should be laid down clearly in the initial legislation,
though the new procedures that I just mentioned whereby both Parliament
and Council can block an implementing measure would bring an extra
safeguard. When you said "wrong target" I initially
thought you were going to say because the target is the proposal
of the Commission and the violation of subsidiarity is often in
the knobs that are added as you go through the Parliament and
Council, and one might even say especially the Council. That perhaps
is something where you might want to say the procedures need continuous
following by national parliaments of proposals as they go right
the way through the legislative procedure.
Q332 Lord Wade of Chorlton:
My Lord Chairman, may I just follow up on something you said earlier.
I was very interested in your explanation of the extra powers
of the Parliament which you now think it has because one of the
reasons why I feel you get so much criticism in the UK is the
lack of understanding of what their parliamentarians do. It is
all right saying now that the Lisbon Treaty enables extra involvement
from the Parliament, but it will be up to the parliamentarians
to make it clear to their electorate that they are actually making
use of it. You are parliamentarians, how much do you discuss this?
How much do you appreciate that the role you need to play in order
to get a proper representative relationship with your constituents
is going to be the key in making a long-term success in Europe
if you are going to get the support for both the changes in the
Union, the Treaties and everything else? Personally, I do not
feel that message has got across certainly to our UK parliamentarians
because we hear very little of the arguments that they take, the
positions they take on these various issues, and that comes through
to us, but maybe it is the messenger rather than what they are
doing. I would like your opinion on that and how what you are
now saying is an opportunity is going to be fully utilised in
practice.
Mr Leinen: That question is asked very often
and whenever I have a group of visitors that question is asked
by citizens. It looks very difficult from a distance but it is
very simple in practice. We are a Parliament elected in direct
universal elections, like any national parliament, and we have
the same tasks, which have been developed treaty-by-treaty and
step-by-step. Like any parliament we control the Executive, participate
in a double chamber system in legislation and decide on the budget,
being understood that the European level decides only on expenses
and not on income, which is a reserve for the Member States by
unanimity. It was originally for the Parliament to control the
budget of the Executive and we welcome very much that we have
now overcome the distinction between obligatory and non-obligatory
budget lines in the EU. For us in the agricultural field a lot
will change in the direction that Britain has been campaigning
for for many years and in my opinion this subventionism will not
survive with co-decision in the Parliament.
Mr Kirkhope: At this early stage of our discussions
I do not want to put too much dissension into the situation but
I would like to touch on the general point about democracy. It
is one thing to argue, or to suggest that we afford greater opportunities
for democracy but at the same time not look at the quality of
the democracy. I am only too aware of the charge of the Laeken
Declaration, which was a charge that others in this room are well
aware of, that we had to take on board in the Convention, which
was really to make Europe more understandable to the citizens
and, indeed, in the British context that was an extremely desirable
thing for us to be charged with. I do not know whether anyone
would disagree that perhaps we did not quite achieve that. Certainly
that was an important prerequisite, as far as I was concerned,
and everything else then followed. That is why I am concerned.
I am concerned about the quality of democracy as opposed to the
quantity in this context. The level and standard of scrutiny which
exists in terms of our own national legislatures is extremely
patchy. As my Lord Chairman knows very well, I have congratulated
him and all those members of the House of Lords on their interest
in European affairs, which is at a higher level and higher quality
I have to say than in that of the "other place". I do
think that scrutiny, therefore, is something which needs to be
dealt with very strongly and I do not think whatever happens in
this Treaty ultimately is going to be able to affect that. It
is also a big mistake for us to assume that the rights which we
are giving to our national parliaments, or endorsing, will necessarily
be understood or utilised properly. I will not go back through
the yellow card procedure or the subsidiarity issues, all I would
say is that at the moment we do have a very loose connection or
alliance with other national parliaments. Of course, there is
COSAC and other ways in which parliaments talk to each other,
but trying to get some kind of clear similarity of approach or
understanding of difficulties coming from the European legislative
process, it is not going to be easy for parliaments to be able
to make use of those particular opportunities and, therefore,
that is very difficult. In relation to the government in the UK
in particular, one of the things we called for was that meetings
of Council should be far more transparent, far more open to public
scrutiny and the mandate which it would be necessary for the Council
to obtain from national parliaments is something which seems to
have gone by the board. We have had promises from various foreign
secretaries in the present government that there would indeed
be greater transparency in Council meetings and, indeed, greater
discussion before those meetings, if you like, a form of mandate
from Parliament to the decisions that were going to be taken or
pursued on behalf of the UK. I do not think that has taken effect
although I am sure the Government would argue the other way and
say at least they now have debates. As far as obtaining any kind
of mandate is concerned, that is a long way off. Therefore, there
is a great gap in democracy, a great gap in accountability. We,
as MEPs, as you will know, are elected in the UK, albeit democratically
elected but under a process which is enormously remote to most
people. I represent five million people in Yorkshire and what
are my chances of communicating anything very much to them unless
with the goodwill of the regional newspapers? It is very, very
difficult indeed. In other countries the list system is on a national
basis and even more remote from the people. We must see this in
terms of linking to the citizens and getting understanding, particularly
in the UK where we have a real problem over this, that I am pro-EU
but am also sceptical about many of the things that occur and
obviously I am not in favour of this particular constitutional
process at this time. You have to understand, and I am sure everybody
does, that we do have that particular problem and we have failed
to address it. That is something we ought to do together but it
is also part of having some kind of clearer approach to European
affairs than we have at the present time.
Q333 Chairman:
Before going to Lord Maclennan I have the feeling that Elmar Brok
would like to intervene at this point.
Mr Brok: Thank you very much. I will do a favour
to Timothy Kirkhope and not attack him!
Mr Kirkhope: The usual arrangement!
Mr Brok: First of all, the election law for
the European Parliament is done by Member States, every Member
State can do it as it likes, they have different systems. We might
have different opinions about the proportional system or the British
directly elected system of first past the post is the winner,
but you cannot say if other countries have other systems it is
less democratic. There are different traditions and it has nothing
to do with the rights of the European Parliament. First of all,
if we consider the Treaty of Lisbon we have to consider whether
it is better or worse than the present situation. I have not heard
any argument when it comes to the democratic accountability questions
that the Treaty of Lisbon is worse than the Treaty of Nice, it
is better in every respect. The Treaty of Lisbon could be better
but it is better than the Treaty of Nice, and this is important.
First of all, there are the rights of the European Parliament.
Our former President battled for more rights for the European
Parliament and we have more or less done the job now with this
Treaty. At a European level we have more or less all that we wanted
to have. Secondly, I agree with my Lord Chairman that a subsidiarity
check is perhaps not the most important question but it is a safeguard,
as Richard talked about. Because the Commission in the future
has to give all the proposals to national parliaments eight weeks
before the legislators, the Council and the European Parliament
starts to work, that gives a stronger position to national parliaments
to check with their national governments as members of the Council.
We cannot solve more by this Treaty. How this is used is the question
and how the national parliaments want to work and we have nothing
to say on the constitutional powers of national parliaments on
this question because they are national rights. The working conditions
become better for national parliaments by that and that is very
important progress. On the question of the relationship between
the European Parliament and national parliaments, I believe we
have to do more. When I was Chairman of Foreign Affairs we invited
national committees to certain deliberations three or four times
a year, and here we have to develop this. This is also a question
for national parliaments. I am a member of the European Affairs
Committee of my national parliament with all the rights but without
a voting right because I am not elected to the national parliament
and it would be unconstitutional. Therefore, if we have a debate
in this committee in the national parliament which I think will
help in the argumentation, my national parliament becomes stronger
towards Brussels and especially its own government to control
it. This is also a question we cannot solve in the Treaty of Lisbon.
This is a sovereign decision for the national parliaments as to
how they want to deal with that. Having a closer relationship
with your MEPs within the British national parliament and both
the House of Lords and the House of Commons might be a way to
do that. As a Member of the European Parliament I have a right
to go to every working group in my national parliament and get
invitations to the group meetings of the national parliament and
ask for the floor and I get the floor like a member of the national
parliament. I even have an office in my national parliament in
order to make it possible to develop such a relationship which
makes us both stronger. That is the point of modern democracy.
It is not a question of whether it is the national parliament
or European Parliament. We have to become stronger through co-operation
to do our job and control our bureaucracies, both the national
and European ones. We can only win this battle if we co-operate
and the Treaty of Lisbon gives us a better possibility of doing
that if we want to do so. Before we start on the details can I
make one more point I would like to mention. I believe that, including
the Single European Act, there is no Treaty where we have less
transfer of competences. In the Single Act, in Maastricht, Amsterdam
and Nice we had more transfer of competences to the European Union.
The change is the stronger roles of national parliaments and the
European Parliament. This is major progress. When we come to Home
and Legal Affairs, where we have majority voting now, this was
already a competence of the European Union. There has been no
change in competence since Amsterdam and Nice but the rights of
the European Parliament because it is co-decision of the European
Parliament now, not the transfer of competences and also it is
a question where Britain got an opt-out, so it is both more democratic
and there is less British involvement!
Q334 Chairman:
Could I put this to you, and let me be blunt: at least three of
you, and I probably exclude Timothy Kirkhope in this, think that
over this Lisbon Treaty the British are an absolute pain in the
neck because we have asked for too many opt-ins, too many opt-outs,
too many red lines. What is the feeling in the Parliament about
this? Give us a really, really frank answer.
Mr Leinen: This is a weakness of the Treaty
of Lisbon, that it is a treaty of footnotes, opt-outs and declarations.
Those who oppose this Treaty in any way refer to the bulk of paper
that accompanies the Treaty but because we are now 27 Member States
we are no longer 12 or 15, we have more diversity. The success
of the EU is to be flexible and adjust itself to certain necessities
and problems that Member States have. That is the positive side
of declarations, footnotes and opt-outs. The negative side is
that we are a community of law, we are not a usual international
organisation but a community of law, and opt-outs create incoherence
in this Union. Especially painful for the vast majority in the
Parliament is the opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
I think that this will be a boomerang in a few years and now there
is already a boomerang. If you debate it without emotions people
would understand that the Charter strengthens the rights and freedoms
of the European citizens whereas it is pretty clear that there
is no extra competence at a European level via the Charter. I
was a member of the Convention on the Charter of Fundamental Rights
and I know Britain got full success in what it wanted and their
representative, Lord Goldsmith, at the end had the full support
of that Convention. The task was to make visible what rights and
freedoms we have either from our constitutions, from the European
Treaties or from international conventions that all Member States
have ratified. The Charter is the result of it with maybe one,
two or three innovations. When we talked about genetic engineering,
and Article II on the health of human beings where there was something
about cloning, reproductive cloning, we excluded that in Europe
and that was acceptable. Then we had data protection, which is
a more modern right. It is what we have, it is acquis communitaire
in all our Member states. I call it "opt-out", Richard
Corbett tells me it is only clarification. In Poland, but not
for Great Britain, this is a deficit in the image as well as the
capacity of the Union to act inside and outside.
Mr Corbett: We are where we are and you asked
what reactions there are among our colleagues from across the
Parliament. Of course there are aspects of this Treaty that a
majority in the Parliament regret, I would say, including the
loss of the notion of a constitution, that had very strong support
in the European Parliament but, on the other hand, there is a
recognition that there would be no new treaty at all if it were
not acceptable to all 27 Member States. The process of making
it acceptable to all 27 Member States was a complicated negotiation
where every government had positions, whether they were called
red lines or not, that they wished to defend, marks that they
did not wish to be stepped over. That has been the case in the
whole history of the successive Treaties that have gradually built
up our Union. For instance Denmark still has a number of opt-outs,
as it were, which is technically not the right word but for shorthand
we will call it an opt-out, from the time of the Maastricht Treaty,
and they are now considering whether they want to change their
position on that, which is interesting. On the Lisbon Treaty there
are not just the questions of the extension of the British and
Irish opt-in situation and the Protocol on the Charter but also
the extra seat for Italy in the European Parliament, in derogation
of the principle in the Treaty of degressive proportionality,
which as a Parliament we thought was pretty outrageous but, there
we are, that was the price needed to get the unanimous agreement
of every Member State. Rather than going back over that you will
see in the draft report of our Committee that, as a Parliament,
we note there are concerns and regrets but the bulk of our report
is doing what Elmar Brok and Jo Leinen said just now, comparing
what we have got now with what we will have with this new Treaty
if it is ratified and seeing whether it is an improvement or not
and our conclusion was clear: it is an improvement.
Chairman: You mentioned the size of the
Parliament, I am wondering whether Lord Kerr would like to come
in on that one.
Q335 Lord Kerr of Kinlochard:
I am struck by your reference to the wickedness of the extra Italian
seat being a breach of the principle of "degressive proportionality".
Could you define the principle of degressive proportionality,
please?
Mr Leinen: In fact, we have no mathematic formula
for it. I am sure in the next legislature we will have to come
back to this question if Croatia becomes the next Member State
and they will get 13 Members of the European Parliament, so if
we have to stick to 751 as the maximum number of seats this redistribution
procedure will get us back to the debate of what is the formula
for degressive proportionality. Our rapporteurs and then
the plenary had formulated a few criteria and one decisive criterion—
Mr Corbett: Shall I say it? We laid down first
the obvious one, that the bigger a country's population in general
the more seats it should have, but at least one fundamental principle
we defined was the ratio of seats to population should decline
as you go up the scale of the size of population.
Q336 Lord Kerr of Kinlochard:
Could you say why?
Mr Corbett: That will no longer be the case
for Italy.
Q337 Lord Kerr of Kinlochard:
Could you say why?
Mr Corbett: How else would you define "degressive".
If it is strictly proportional to population—
Q338 Lord Kerr of Kinlochard:
I would like to know why this is democratic. A democratic principle
is that a voter, wherever he lives, has the same degree of rights
in respect of representation in the European Parliament, but this
principle appears to fly in the face of that.
Mr Corbett: The principle of degressive proportionality
was laid down in the Treaty. We came up with figures that respected
that principle, which is to say that the bigger a country, instead
of a linear graph it is a tapering graph, and that is not unknown
in national situations, in the United Kingdom Scotland has a slightly
higher proportion of members to population in the UK Parliament
than does England, for instance. That has always been the case
in the European Parliament to a slightly greater degree as a recognition
of the fact that we are a Union of 27 different nations.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard: I admit to having
some memory of the inclusion of the principle of degressive proportionality
in the text that I was associated with. What I had hoped was that
the Parliament would produce a definition of the principle, and,
to be honest, I had hoped that the Parliament when it made its
proposal would come up with a number rather lower than 751, and
I do not mean 750. It does seem to me to be a pity that it is
so big. I also hoped that the Parliament would define the principle
so that there was a formula which would apply automatically in
the case of a future enlargement and it seems to me we have not
quite got there.
Chairman: That appears to be the case.
Q339 Lord Powell of Bayswater:
My Lord Chairman, I wanted to get away from this three decimal
point subject of degressive proportionality and go back to the
very interesting comments that were being made about the British
attitude. I think opinion in Britain is very confused: on the
one hand it has the government which tells it, "This is not
a constitution, this is just a technical amending treaty, nothing
to worry about, go to sleep again and forget about it", and
you have got an official opposition that says, "On the contrary,
this is actually pretty well the full original constitution and
you should worry", and then they hear several Heads of Government
and State in Europe, including former President Giscard, saying,
"It is really 95% of the original constitution". What
do you, as a Constitutional Committee, think? Is this basically
the constitution with a few very minor amendments? I see your
draft report refers to "abandonment of several features of
the constitution". What do you think are the important differences?
Mr Leinen: It was never a constitution before,
it was always a treaty. It was called a Constitutional Treaty
because we had the Single Treaty with Part I where the fundamentals
were laid down in some 50 Articles and Part II where the Charter
of Fundamental Rights has been integrated, so Part I and Part
II gave the character of a fundamental treaty and at the end they
called it a Constitutional Treaty agreed by all 27 Member States
in the IGC. It is not useful to continue on this play of words.
We have followed the Laeken Declaration which wants to make the
EU in view of this huge enlargement of 12 or more Member States
more effective, more transparent and more democratic, and let
us focus on these goals and objectives. I would say we have done
a good job there. This is going in the right direction and it
fulfils sometimes more and sometimes less the objectives laid
down in the Laeken Declaration. You can call it what you want.
I was joking that in Portugal they call it the Reform Treaty,
in Germany the Fundamental Treaty, in France the Mini Treaty or
the Simplified Treaty, so they followed the words of Sarkozy,
the whole of the media from left to right, and in Britain you
still call it the Constitutional Treaty because parts of the substance
have been saved. It is useless to continue this debate. One should
look at what is achieved according to the objectives in the Laeken
Declaration and how we compare it with the existing Treaty of
Nice: is it better or is it worse? Our judgment is clear that
it is coming nearer the objectives of Laeken and it is better
than Nice.
Mr Brok: I am a moderate Christian Democrat
so I do not have the strength to ask for the floor very often!
I have a few remarks first of all. It was the European Parliament
in the Convention which was asking for a lower figure, but it
was the governments, and especially the IGC governments, which
put it at the higher level. We made a proposal for 750 because
three figures were set by the Heads of State and Government: 750
was set both in the IGC for the Constitutional Treaty and the
mandate in June; 96 and six for the smaller countries. Because
of that we only had to find a solution in-between the three figures.
I preferred a lower figure, the original one was 732, for example.
We have to pursue the question between the effectiveness of the
work of the European Parliament and at the same time the representation
of the people. The more people you have to represent the more
difficult it is to represent them and, therefore, we have to find
this balance. To have the solution that we have no more is a problem.
The Italian problem with the one seat was a lesser problem than
the British problem with the Charter of Fundamental Rights. I
would like to agree with you that the British policy was very
painful to me because in the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the
possibilities and declarations that it only applies to European
legislation and its implementation to European institutions was
negotiated five times by Britain, once in the Charter of Fundamental
Rights Convention, twice in the Constitutional Convention, the
fourth time in the IGC for the Conventional Treaty and the fifth
time in the mandate. The result was the opt-out. We got the British
negotiation result but Britain did not join it and we considered
that unfair. If you did not want to join why negotiate with the
others, that was our feeling. The same was partly the case with
Home and Legal Affairs, you got your red lines and we accepted
that because we wanted to go forward but it was a problem for
us because after you got an agreement this agreement was negotiated
because of the will of a country which got this agreement. It
might be said that this is a very clever method of negotiation,
but we did not feel very happy about that. To see the debate after
you got all these red lines in such a country where the debate
is going much too far creates problems for understanding in other
countries. On this question Britain was a winner in the negotiations,
it was not amended in the IGC. It was a winner as no other country.
In a certain way this has to be accepted if we want to talk in
a constructive way with each other. On the question of is it a
constitution or not, the Constitutional Treaty was not a constitution,
it was a treaty written partly in the form of a constitution.
In legal terms it was never a constitution because there was no
statehood. Now it has taken out all the wording which might give
the impression that Europe was looking for statehood. Even the
word "law" has been taken out and we are back to words
like "directive" which nobody understands. The result
of that is people understand less about Europe. The explanation
was everything that could give the impression that Europe was
looking for statehood has been taken out and we can see it is
clearly defined that the European Union does not have the competence
of competences, it is clearly said in this Treaty that every competence
the European Union has is given by the Member States and can be
taken away by the Member States. This second explanation was put
into the Lisbon Treaty at the last moment. Member States are more
clearly defined than before as the masters of the situation. This
is an important question that we have to look at. In the future
it is very clearly defined for the first time. In a legal sense
it was always there but it was not in the wording there. It states
that every competence not mentioned as an EU competence stays
automatically as a national competence. This clarification is
now part of the Treaty and it was not there before. I cannot understand
the problem if you look into such cases because when people say
it is a super state, they have got more assurances than they have
ever had.
Chairman: That has opened up the debate
very nicely. I know Lord Maclennan has been waiting.
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