For Your Information: Ireland, EU, Eurozone, Banks & Economy – News & Analysis

Posted on 26 January, 2010 by NationalPlatform.Org

Ghosts of debt and jobs will haunt economy
The Irish Times – Tuesday, December 29, 2009
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/1229/1224261354227.html
Morgan Kelly
OPINION : By 2015, Iceland will almost certainly be a lot better off than Ireland because it dealt decisively with its banks.

For grand corruption, though, we will have to look to Nama. By allowing the banks to dictate the terms of their bailout, the bank rescue was turned into the most lucrative and audacious Tiger Kidnapping in the history of the State, with the difference that, like the sheriff in Blazing Saddles, the bankers held themselves hostage.

Bad banks like Nama were tried on a large scale in the early 1930s in the US, Austria and Germany; and proved to be profoundly corrupt and corrupting institutions, whose primary purpose was to funnel money to politically connected businesses. The German bank is best remembered for setting up what we would now call a special purpose vehicle to fund the presidential election campaign of the odious Paul Hindenberg.

Bad banks do not just happen to be corrupt and anti-democratic institutions, it is what they are designed to be. Effectively, bad banks give governments the power to choose which of a country’s most powerful oligarchs will be forced into bankruptcy, and which will be resuscitated to emerge even more powerful than before.

Nama will get to pick which of the fattest hogs of Irish development will be sliced up and fed, at taxpayer expense, to better connected hogs (remember that Nama has been allocated at least €6.5 billion, considerably more than the Government saved by draconian budget cuts, to “lend” to favoured clients).

While Nama may have momentous political consequences, it has already failed economically: the Irish banks are still zombies, reliant on transfusions of European Central Bank funding to survive until losses on mortgages and business loans finally wipe them out. In the next few months we will discover if the State bankrupts itself by nationalising the banks; or if it has the intelligence to free itself from bank losses by turning the foreign creditors of banks into their owners, as Iceland has just done with Kaupthing bank.

It is ironic that by 2015, having devalued its currency and dealt decisively with its banks, Iceland will almost certainly be a lot better off than Ireland.

Why the eurozone has a tough decade to come
Financial Times – January 6 2010
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/54cc3b20-fa62-11de-beed-00144feab49a.html
Martin Wolf

What would have happened during the financial crisis if the euro had not existed? The short answer is that there would have been currency crises among its members. The currencies of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain would surely have fallen sharply against the old D-Mark. That is the outcome the creators of the eurozone wished to avoid. They have been successful. But, if the exchange rate cannot adjust, something else must instead. That “something else” is the economies of peripheral eurozone member countries. They are locked into competitive disinflation against Germany, the world’s foremost exporter of very high-quality manufactures. I wish them luck.
[...]
Where does that leave peripheral countries today? In structural recession, is the answer. At some point, they have to slash fiscal deficits. Without monetary or exchange rate offsets, that seems sure to worsen the recession already caused by the collapse in their bubble-fuelled private spending. Worse, in the boom years, these countries lost competitiveness within the eurozone. That was also inherent in the system. The interest rates set by the European Central Bank, aimed at balancing supply and demand in the zone, were too low for bubble-fuelled countries. With inflation in sectors producing non-tradeables relatively high, real interest rates were also relatively low in these countries. A loss of external competitiveness and strong domestic demand expanded external deficits. These generated the demand needed by core countries with excess capacity. To add insult to injury, since the core country is highly competitive globally and the eurozone has a robust external position and a sound currency, the euro itself has soared in value.

This leaves peripheral countries in a trap: they cannot readily generate an external surplus; they cannot easily restart private sector borrowing; and they cannot easily sustain present fiscal deficits. Mass emigration would be a possibility, but surely not a recommendation. Mass immigration of wealthy foreigners, to live in now-cheap properties, would be far better. Yet, at worst, a lengthy slump might be needed to grind out a reduction in nominal prices and wages. Ireland seems to have accepted such a future. Spain and Greece have not. Moreover, the affected country would also suffer debt deflation: with falling nominal prices and wages, the real burden of debt denominated in euros will rise. A wave of defaults – private and even public – threaten.

The crisis in the eurozone’s periphery is not an accident: it is inherent in the system. The weaker members have to find an escape from the trap they are in. They will receive little help: the zone has no willing spender of last resort; and the euro itself is also very strong. But they must succeed. When the eurozone was created, a huge literature emerged on whether it was an optimal currency union. We know now it was not. We are about to find out whether this matters.

Are we about to see the end of the much-vaunted eurozone?
The Observer – Sunday 3 January 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/03/peter-oborne-end-of-eurozone
Peter Oborne
In putting financial considerations before social ones, the governments of Europe have ensured that things can only get worse

It is nearly 20 years since the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer Norman Lamont made his notorious remark that unemployment was a “price worth paying” for the restoration of economic stability. Lamont was at once condemned for his comments, made at the height of Britain’s ill-fated membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. The progressive left universally denounced him as arrogant, brutal and out of touch. And yet, only two decades later, the European left has made the identical calculation. The imposition of the euro, and the rigid economic policy a single currency implies, is having socially catastrophic effects across much of Europe on a scale that dwarfs Britain’s suffering in the 1990s.

Consider the facts. In Spain, unemployment has already reached a gut-wrenching 19.3%. But unemployment for those between 16-24 is a catastrophic 42%. In Greece, youth unemployment is 25%, in Ireland 28.4% and Italy 26.9%. Marginal eurozone countries such as Greece, Spain and Ireland are not just in recession. They are in depression – and so long as they remain inside the euro there is no exit.

Before their decision to abandon economic sovereignty and sign up to the euro, policymakers had a tried and tested response to the kind of global setback of the last two years – depreciate the currency and loosen fiscal and monetary policy[…] But inside the euro, individual countries are stripped of the ability to manage their own economies. That is why the global recession has been far, far more devastating for some eurozone members than would otherwise have been the case – in just the same way that membership of the ERM inflicted wholly unnecessary damage on the British economy in the early 1990s.

The European single currency amounts to an experiment in social and economic engineering on a scale only very rarely before encountered in world history. The great question is whether it will work. There is a universal belief among the European political and economic elite that the euro will continue, no matter how much damage it inflicts or how many jobs it costs.
[…]
I believe that this heartless analysis is mistaken, and that the eurozone will in due course collapse (as Karl Marx might well have remarked) under the weight of its own contradictions. Economically, the euro can be spotted a mile off: it is a classic bankers’ ramp. It is designed to do all the things that bankers have historically wanted: create efficient markets, drive down the cost of labour, impose price stability, eliminate trade barriers, confound national boundaries and maximise corporate profits. Bankers don’t care much about youth unemployment in Madrid or home repossessions in Lisbon or riots on the streets of Athens. They worry about the bottom line and the euro has been very good for the bottom line, with stock markets up by an obscene 50% over the last eight months.

Should we divorce the euro?
The Sunday Business Post – 10 January 2010
http://www.sbpost.ie/commentandanalysis/should-we-divorce-the-euro-46642.html
David McWilliams

Joining a currency union is the economic equivalent of a marriage. If a country decides to give up its currency and get into bed with another currency, it would seem ludicrous to entertain this move without being sure that the union was suitable. As we all know, there is a difference between fancying someone and making the thing last.

To avoid single currency arrangements going sour, there is also a ‘matchmaker’ in economic theory. The economic matchmaker goes by the typically incomprehensible name of the ‘optimal currency area theory’. This theory is a checklist of economic attributes which need to line up in order for a monetary union to work.

For a currency union to work for a country, the most important thing is that the country trades overwhelmingly with the other members of the monetary union.

This ensures that all the countries in the union move roughly in the same economic cycle. It is also important that the structures of the respective economies are broadly similar, so that one country doesn’t experience a huge boom, while the rest are just motoring along nicely.

Having similar structures in banking and housing, for example, will imply that a country should not suffer a monumental bust, while the others are merely experiencing a normal recession. Equally, it is important that there is significant movement of people within the currency union – like there is in the US between its states – so that, if a country does slump, its citizens can move to find work in another member country.

In general, for a currency union to work, there should also be a single fiscal policy so that, when one area of the currency slumps, the rest of the union’s taxes go some way to ease the problems in the region in difficulty. This is how the currency unions in the US, Canada and Australia work.

Guess what? None of these attributes was in place when Ireland joined the EU economic and monetary union (EMU) and the euro. So it is clear that we didn’t join for economic reasons. So why did we join? It seems that we were too insecure to behave logically and this national insecurity – particularly among our senior mandarins – prevented us from having a debate.
[…]
The reason we should ask these questions is that it is clear the euro has been a disaster for Ireland, and will ensure our slump lasts considerably longer than it has to. When we look at other countries, we see that, of the three entrants into the then EEC in 1973,we are the only ones using the euro. However, we trade less with other eurozone countries than either Denmark or Britain.

The Irish Credit Bubble
University College Dublin Centre for Economic Research Working Papers Series – WP09/32 – December 2009
http://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/wp09.32.pdf
Google Cache (Web Page)
Morgan Kelly

While NAMA is intended to repair, for now, the damage to the asset side of Irish bank balance sheets from developer loans, their liability side appears unsustainable. The aggressive expansion of Irish bank lending was funded mostly in international wholesale markets, where Irish banks were able to borrow at low rates. From being almost entirely funded by domestic deposits in 1997, by 2008 over half of Irish bank lending was funded by wholesale borrowers through bonds and inter-bank borrowing. This well of easy credit has now run dry. In the words of Bank of England Governor Mervyn King: “But the age of innocence—when banks lent to each other unsecured for three months or longer at only a slight premium to expected policy rates—will not quickly, or ever, return.” As foreign lenders have become nervous of Irish banks, their place has increasingly been taken by borrowing from the European Central Bank and short-term borrowing in the inter-bank market. Payments from NAMA will allow Irish banks to reduce their borrowing by a trivial amount.

Without continued government guarantees of their borrowing and, more problematically, continued ECB forbearance, the operations of the Irish banks do not appear viable.
[...]
By pushing itself close to, and quite possibly beyond, the limits of its fiscal capacity, the Irish state has succeeded in rescuing Irish banks from their losses on developer loans. Despite this, these banks remain as zombies entirely reliant on continued Irish government guarantees and ECB forbearance, and committed solely to reducing their own debts.

While bank capital levels are, probably, adequate for the markedly smaller scale of their future lending, we will see below that even fairly modest losses on their mortgage portfolios will be sufficient to wipe out most or all of that capital. Having exhausted its resources in rescuing the Irish banks from the first wave of developer losses, the Irish state can do nothing but watch as the second wave of mortgage defaults sweeps in and drowns them. In other words, it is starting to appear that the Irish banking system is too big to save. As mortgage losses crystallise, the Irish government’s ill conceived project of insulating bank bond-holders from any losses on their investments is sliding beyond the means of its taxpayers.

The mounting losses of its banking system are facing the Irish state with a stark choice. It can attempt a NAMA II for mortgage losses that will end in a bond market strike or a sovereign default. Or it can, probably with the assistance of the IMF and EU, organise a resolution that shares property losses with bank creditors through a partial debt for equity swap. It is easy for governments everywhere to forget that their states are not wholly controlled subsidiaries of their banks but separate entities; and a resolution that transfers bank losses from the Irish taxpayer to bank bond holders will leave Ireland with a low level of debt that, even after several years of deficits, it can easily afford.

Filed under: EU Economy, Euro / Monetary Union, Irish Economy | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Lisbon’s Constitutional Revolution by Stealth

Posted on 1 December, 2009 by NationalPlatform.Org

EUROFACTS … 30 November 2009

LISBON TREATY COMES INTO FORCE TODAY, TUESDAY

The Lisbon Treaty, which has 99% the same legal effect as the EU Constitution that was rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005, comes into force on tomorrow, 1 December.

The European Union Act 2009 was published at the end of October. This Act implements the second Lisbon Treaty referendum result by amending the European Communities Act 1972 which has made European law applicable in the State up to now. The new Act makes the laws, acts and measures of the European Union “established by virtue of the Lisbon Treaty” part of the domestic law of the State.

This is a constitutionally different European Union from what we call the European Union at present, which was established by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, although its name is the same. This post-Lisbon EU replaces the European Community which Ireland joined in 1973 and which made supranational  European laws up to now, and takes over all its powers and institutions. From Tuesday therefore we will all be endowed with an additional citizenship to our Irish citizenship – a real EU citizenship with associated rights and duties, something quite different in its implications to the purely notional or symbolical EU citizenship that we are assumed  to have possessed up to now.

The article below explains the constitutional revolution in the EU and its Member States which has been brought about by the Lisbon Treaty and which will formally culminate on Tuesday.  This is something that scarcely figured in what passed for “debate” on the Lisbon Treaty in our Lisbon Two referendum. The  statutory Referendum Commission completely failed to explain the constitutional significance of Lisbon to Irish citizen-voters, even though that was its prime duty under the  Referendum Act establishing it – something the Government and Yes-side interests must be very grateful for.

PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT PICKET ON DAIL … TUESDAY 1-1.30 P.M.

The People’s Movement, whose chairman is former MEP Patricia McKenna, will protest against the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty and the undemocratic manner in which it was pushed through, in Ireland and across the EU,  for half an hour outside Dail Eireann in Kildare Street from 1 to 1.30 p.m. today,  Tuesday.    Interested people are invited to come along with appropriate posters, slogans etc.

LADY CATHERINE ASHTON, BARONESS ASHTON OF UPHOLLAND

Baroness Catherine Ashton is the new EU “Foreign Minister” under the Lisbon Treaty – properly titled “The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”.  The Irish media have so far been remarkably reluctant to give this lady her proper title. The Irish Times refers to her as “Ms Ashton”.  Is it not curious, this reluctance to give a member of the House of Lords, which the Baroness remains, her proper designation?

Baroness Ashton will receive an annual salary of  €350,000 and have a chauffeured car, a housing allowance and a staff of 20. She will have control of the new EU External Action Service, starting with 5000 staff already engaged  on “external relations”, based on EU delegations in 130 countries – and the service is expected to grow rapidly.  Current EU foreign policy boss Javier Solana  has said the service would become “the biggest diplomatic service in the world”. It is estimated to cost some ¤50 billion between now and 2013.

This EU foreign service is not open to democratic scrutiny, is likely to develop a life of its own and come to undermine the foreign policies of EU Member States.

The Sunday Times has noted that staff in overseas EU offices typically work a 4-day week, are entitled to first-class travel to and from their posting, as well as private health insurance and an allowance of up to £1,700 a month to spend on school fees.

EU COMMISSION  TO “LOOK AT” DIRECT EU TAXES

Agence France Presse reports that in a question-time session in the European Parliamen a week ago, European Commission President Jose Barroso said he would look at the idea of raising direct EU taxation.  Asked if he agreed with Herman Van Rompuy, the new EU President, that there should be EU taxes, he said: “I intend to look at all issues of taxation in the EU. We have to look at this, we have to look at all resources of the EU.  We have promised it to the Parliament, the programme with which I was elected was to look at possible ‘own resources’ and this is in the programme that was adopted by this European Parliament.”

EUROPEAN COUNCIL PRESIDENT VAN ROMPUY AN ARCH FEDERALIST

Herman Van Rompuy, 62,  has said that he favoured the Lisbon Treaty as long as it promoted the aim of “more Europe”. He helped to draw up a strongly Euro-federalist manifesto for his Flemish Christian Democrat Party, calling for more EU power. It said: “Apart from the euro, other national symbols need to be replaced by European symbols – licence plates, identity cards, presence of more EU flags, one-time EU sports events.”

Speaking  a fortnight ago at a private dinner organised by EU-federalist members of the Bilderberg Group  at the Chateau de Val-Duchesse, where the EU’s founding Treaty of Rome was negotiated in 1957, Mr Van Rompuy backed plans for “green taxes” to fund the EU. He said: “The possibilities of financial levies at European level must be seriously examined, and for the first time large countries in the Union are open to that.”

Article 311 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which governs the means of raising money to finance the EU,  provides under an amendment made by the Lisbon Treaty that the EU Council of Ministers “may establish new categories of own resources or abolish an existing category”,  and the new EU President was referring to that.

Pieter Van Cleppe, of the think-tank Open Europe, commented: “Van Rompuy is your typical EU federalist. He isn’t going to step on anyone’s toes or try to dominate the world like Tony Blair or President Sarkozy might have. But he can be relied upon to quietly make sure that the EU gets more and more powers, with less and less say for voters.”

The new EU President will earn €350,000 a year, taxed at 25 percent, and will have a staff of 22 press officers, assistants and administrators, in addition to 10 security agents.  This is double the salary he had as Belgian Prime Minister and  is significantly more than US President Barack Obama’s salary, which is around $400,000 a year or €269,000. The total cost of the President and his team will be ¤6 million a year.

LISBON’S CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION BY STEALTH

by Anthony Coughlan

With the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty on Tuesday 1 December, members of the European Parliament, who up to now have been “representatives of the peoples of the States brought together in the Community” (Art.189 TEC),  become “representatives of the Union’s citizens” (Art.14 TEU).

This change in the status of MEPs is but one illustration of the constitutional revolution being brought about by the Lisbon Treaty.

For Lisbon, like the EU Constitution before it, establishes for the first time a European Union which is constitutionally separate from and superior to its Member States, just as the USA is separate from and superior to its 50 constituent states or as Federal Germany is in relation to its Länder.

The 27 EU members thereby lose their character as true sovereign States. Constitutionally, they become more like regional states in a multinational Federation, although they still retain some of the trappings of their former sovereignty. Simultaneously, 500 million Europeans becomes real citizens of the constitutionally new post-Lisbon European Union, with real citizens’ rights and duties with regard to this EU, as compared with the merely notional or symbolical EU citizenship they are assumed to have possessed up to now.

Most Europeans are unaware of these astonishing changes, for two reasons.  One is that, with the exception of the Irish, they have been denied any chance of learning about and debating them in national referendums. The other is that the terms “European Union”, “EU citizen” and “EU citizenship” remain the same before and after Lisbon, although Lisbon changes their constitutional content fundamentally.

The Lisbon Treaty therefore is a constitutional revolution by stealth.

The EU Constitution, which the peoples of France and Holland rejected in 2005, sought to establish a new European Union in the constitutional form of a Federation directly. Its first article stated: “This Constitution establishes the European Union”. That would clearly have been a European Union with a different constitutional basis from the EU that had been set up by the Maastricht Treaty 13 years before.

Lisbon brings a constitutionally new Union into being indirectly rather than directly, by amending the two existing European Treaties instead of replacing them entirely, as the earlier Constitutional Treaty had sought to do. Thus Lisbon states: “The Union shall be founded on the present Treaty” – viz. the Treaty on European Union (TEU) -”and on the Treaty on the Functioning of the Union.” These two Treaties together then become the Constitution of the post-Lisbon European Union. A new Union is in effect being “constituted”, although the word “Constitution” is not used.

What we called the “European Union” pre-Lisbon is the descriptive term for the totality of legal relations between its 27 Member States and their peoples. This encompassed the European Community, which had legal personality, made supranational European laws and had various State-like features, as well as the Member States cooperating together on the basis of retained sovereignty in foreign policy and defence and in crime and justice matters.

Lisbon changes this situation fundamentally by giving the post-Lisbon Union the constitutional form of a true supranational Federation, in other words a State. The EU would still lack some powers of a fully developed Federation, the most obvious one being the power to force its Member States to go to war against their will. It would possess most of the powers of a State however, although it has nothing like the tax and spending levels of its constituent Member States.

Three steps to a federal-style Constitution

Lisbon’s constitutional revolution takes place in three interconnected steps:

Firstly, the Treaty establishes a European Union with legal personality and a fully independent corporate existence in all Union areas for the first time (Arts.1 and 47 TEU). This enables the post-Lisbon Union to function as a State vis-a-vis other States externally, and in relation to its own citizens internally

Secondly, Lisbon abolishes the European Community which goes back to the Treaty of Rome and which makes European laws at present, and transfers the Community’s powers and institutions to the new Union, so that it is the post-Lisbon Union, not the Community, which will make supranational European laws henceforth (Art.1 TEU).  Lisbon also transfers to the EU the “intergovernmental” powers over crime, justice and home affairs, as well as foreign policy and security, which at present are not covered by European law-making, leaving only aspects of the Common Foreign, Security and Defence Policy outside the scope of its supranational powers. The Treaty thereby give a unified constitutional structure to the post-Lisbon Union.

Thirdly, Lisbon then makes 500 million Europeans into real citizens of the new Federal-style Union which the Treaty establishes (Arts.9 TEU and 20 TFEU). Instead  of EU citizenship “complementing” national citizenship,  as under the present Maastricht Treaty-based EU (Art.17 TEC), which makes such citizenship essentially symbolical, Lisbon provides that EU citizenship shall be “additional to” national citizenship.

This is a real dual citizenship – not of two different States, but of two different levels of one State. One can only be a citizen of a State and all States must have citizens. Dual citizenship like that provided for in Lisbon is normal in classical Federations which have been established from the bottom up by constituent states surrendering their sovereignty to a superior federal entity, in contrast to federations that have come into being “top-down”, as it were, as a result of unitary states adopting federal form.  Examples of the former are the USA, 19th Century Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Australia. Lisbon would confer a threefold citizenship on citizens of Federal Germany’s Länder.

Being a citizen means that one must obey the law and give loyalty to the authority of the State one is a citizen of – in the case of classical Federations, of the two state levels, the federal and the regional or provincial. In the post-Lisbon EU the rights and duties attaching to citizenship of the Union will be superior to those attaching to one’s national citizenship in any case of conflict between the two, because of the superiority of Union law over national law and Constitutions (Declaration No 17 concerning Primacy).

The EU will be constitutionally superior even though the powers of the new Union come from its Member States in accordance with the “principle of conferral” (Art.5 TEU). Where else after all could it get its powers from?  This is so even though the Member States retain their national Constitutions and their citizens keep their national citizenships. The local states of the USA retain their different state Constitutions and citizenships, even though both are subordinate to the US Federal Constitution in any case of conflict between the two. The tenth amendment to the US Constitution alludes to the principle of conferral when it lays down that powers not delegated to the US Federation “are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people“.

Likewise,  it is not unusual for the Constitutions of classical Federations to provide for a right of withdrawal for their constituent states, just as the Lisbon Treaty does (Art.50 TEU). The existence of these features in the Constitution of the post-Lisbon Union does not take away from its federal character.

An alternative source of democratic legitimacy to the Nation State

Under Lisbon population size will in turn become the primary basis for EU law-making, as in any State with a common citizenry. This will happen after 2014, when the Treaty provision comes into force that EU laws will be made  by 55% of Member States as long as they represent 65% of the total population of the Union.

Lisbon provides an alternative source of democratic legitimacy which challenges the right of national governments to be the representatives of their electorates in the EU. The amended Treaty provides: “The functioning of the Union shall be founded on representative democracy. Citizens are directly represented at Union level in the European Parliament. Member States are represented in the European Council by their Heads of State or Government and in the Council by their governments…” (Art.10 TEU).  Contrast this with what is stated to be the foundation of the present Mastricht Treaty-based EU (Art.6 TEU): “The Union is founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law, principles which are common to the Member States.”

The constitutional structure of the post-Lisbon EU is completed by the provision  which turns the European Council of Prime Ministers and Presidents into an “institution” of the new Union (Art.13 TEU), so that its acts or its failing to act would, like those of the other Union institutions, be subject to legal review by the EU Court of Justice.

Constitutionally speaking, the summit meetings  of the European Council will henceforth no longer be “intergovernmental” gatherings outside supranational European structures, as they have been up to now.  The European Council will in effect be the Cabinet Government of the post-Lisbon Union. Its individual members will be constitutionally obliged to represent the Union to their Member States as well as their Member States to the Union, with the former function imposing primacy of obligation in any case of conflict or tension between the two.

One doubts if all the Heads of State or Government who make up the European Council themselves appreciate this!

As regards the State authority of the post-Lisbon Union, this will be embodied in the Union’s own executive, legislative and judicial institutions: the European Council, Council of Ministers, Commission, Parliament and Court of Justice.  It will be embodied also in the Member States and their authorities as they implement and apply EU law and interpret and apply national law in conformity with Union law. Member States will be constitutionally required to do this under the Lisbon Treaty. Thus EU “State authorities” as represented for example by EU soldiers and policemen patrolling our streets in EU uniforms, will not be needed as such.

Although the Lisbon Treaty has given the EU a Federal-style Constitution without most people noticing, they are bound to find out in time and react against what is being done. There is no European people or demos which could give democratic legitimacy to the institutions the Lisbon Treaty establishes and make people identify with these as they do with the institutions of their home countries. This is the core problem of the  EU integration project. Lisbon in effect has made the EU’s democratic deficit much worse.
It is hard to imagine that this will not make struggles to reestablish national independence and democracy and to repatriate supranational powers back to the Member States the central issue of EU politics in the years and decades ahead.

N.B. Although the above are major constitutional changes by any standard, both for the EU and its Member States,  Ireland’s Referendum Commission, under its chairman Mr Justice Frank Clarke, made absolutely no attempt to explain them or convey their significance to citizens in the Lisbon Two referendum in October. This was despite the fact that the Referendum Commission’s prime statutory duty under the Referendum Act was to explain to citizens how the proposed Lisbon constitutional amendment would affect the Irish Constitution.  The Referendum Commissioners were thereby guilty of a profound constitutional delinquency, for which the Government must surely be very grateful.

Anthony Coughlan is Director of the National Platform EU Research and Information Centre, Dublin, and President of the Foundation for EU Democracy, Brussels.

OPEN EUROPE’S 50 NEW EXAMPLES OF HOW THE EU BUDGET IS WASTED

The EU’s accountants – the European Court of Auditors (ECA) -  published their annual report on the EU’s budget in early November. The ECA refused to give the EU’s accounts a clean bill of health for the 15th year in a row, owing to fraud and mismanagement in the budget. Like last year however, the auditors did sign off the Commission’s own accounts, saying that they accurately represented how much money was raised and spent.

Although the ECA’s report is about the management of the accounts, the occasion represents an opportunity to take a closer look at the EU budget as a whole. Because while mismanagement of the accounts continues to be problematic, even when EU payments are deemed “clean” they are often still hugely wasteful. This is because the process underpinning how money is spent encourages poor project selection.

National governments are handed a pot of money that has to be spent, regardless of whether there’s a real need or demand for a certain type of project. As a result, EU-funded projects easily become expensive solutions to invented problems. The complexity and needless centralisation of these budget programmes means that taxpayers are not getting value for their money.
To illustrate this, Open Europe has produced a light-hearted list of 50 new examples of EU waste. The list is by no means comprehensive, but designed to show the types of peculiar projects on which EU money has been wasted in the past. They include:

  • An art education project called “Donkeypedia”, in which a donkey travelled through the Netherlands to meet and greet primary school children, which was part of the EU’s €7 million ‘Year of Intercultural Dialogue’ initiative.
  • An EU grant worth 800,000 Swedish kronor (€80,000), given to Sweden’s third largest city, Malmo, in 2008 to create a virtual version of itself in “Second Life” – a virtual fantasy world inhabited by computer-generated residents.
  • €400,000 to get children drawing portraits of each other in the name of European citizenship.
  • €198,500 for an EU puppet theatre network in the Baltics.

To read Open Europe’s 50 new examples of EU waste in full, see here:

www.openeurope.org.uk/research/top50waste.pdf

Filed under: EU & Democracy, EU Economy, EU Taxes, Lisbon Treaty | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Statement by Anthony Coughlan on the Lisbon Two referendum result

Posted on 3 October, 2009 by NationalPlatform.Org

Not the will of the people, but the fear of the people, has led a majority of Irish voters to approve ratifying the Lisbon Treaty in yesterday’s re-run referendum.

Ireland’s voters voted not on the content of Lisbon but on membership of the EU, on fear of political isolation if they did not say Yes to the same Treaty as they said No to last year, and on the promise of jobs and economic recovery which the Yes-side bullied and bamboozled them into believing was they would get if they only voted Yes.

Thus the bankrupt Irish political Establishment, which has ruined its country’s economy, has opted through stupidity and fear to clamp an undemocratic Constitution on itself and most of Europe.

This year the Republic of Ireland will suffer a decline of nearly one-tenth in its economic output; it will have a Budget deficit equivalent to 12% of GDP, an unemployment rate of some 14% of its labour force and resumed net emigration from the country.

One accepts the result of the Lisbon re-run as a fact, but it is not a result that democrats need morally or politically to identify with or approve. This result does not have political legitimacy, whatever the voting percentages amount to, because of the fraudulent and undemocratic way in which the referendum was run, making it unique in these respects among the 30 or so referendums that have been held in Ireland since its Constitution was adopted in 1937.

With limitless money provided by the Brussels Commission, the political parties in the European Parliament, the Irish Government and private business firms, Ireland’s Yes-side forces easily outspent the Nos by at least ten to one in a referendum campaign which was unique in modern Irish history for its massive unlawfulness and breaches of the country’s referendum law.

There were at least six dimensions to this illegality:

1) The intervention of the European Commission, entailing massive expenditure of money to influence Irish opinion towards a Yes, the running of a web-site and the issuing of statements that sought to counter No-side arguments, and the adocacy of a Yes vote by Commission President Barroso and other Commissioners and their staffs during visits to Ireland. This is unlawful under European law, as the Commission has no function in relation to the ratification of new Treaties, something that is exclusively a matter for the Member States under their own constitutional procedures;

2.) The part funding of the posters and press advertising of most of Ireland’s Yes-side political parties by their sister parties in the European Parliament, even though it is illegal under Irish law to receive donations from sources outside the country in a referendum and even though, under European law, money provided by the European Parliament to cross-national political parties is supposed to be confined to informational-type material and to avoid partisan advocacy;

3) The Irish Government’s unlawful use of public funds in circulating to voters a postcard with details of the so-called “assurances” of the European Council, followed by a brochure some time later containing a tendentious summary of the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty, as well as other material – steps that were in breach of the 1995 Irish Supreme Court judgement in McKenna that it is unconstitutional of the Government to use public funds to seek to obtain a particular result in a referendum;

4) The failure of the country’s statutory Referendum Commission to carry out its function under the Referendum Act that established it of explaining to citizens how the proposed constitutional amendment and its text would affect the Irish Constitution. Instead the Commission’s Chairman, Judge Frank Clarke, turned the Commission into an arm of Government propaganda, while the judge indulged himself in various “solo-runs” on radio and in the newspapers, giving several erroneous explanations of provisions of the Lisbon Treaty, even though this was quite beyond his powers under the Act;

5) Huge expenditure of money by private companies such as Intel and Ryanair to advocate a Yes vote, without any statutory limit, in possible breach of Irish company and tax law, and undoubtedly constituting a major democratic abuse.

6) Breaches by the Irish broadcast media of their obligation under the Broadcasting Acts to be fair to all interests concerned in their coverage of issues of public controversy and debate. Newstalk 106, owned by Mr Denis O’Brien, a committed supporter of the Yes side, was quite shameless in its partisanship on its current affairs programmes.

Democrats across Europe will now hope that the brave President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, will hold back Czech ratification of the Treaty until the constitutional challenge that has been launched there is completed and there is a change of Government in Britain by next May. In that way the promise of a referendum made to the British people in the Labour Party’s Election Manifesto may yet be fulfilled under the Conservatives – something that would give our fellow countrymen and women in Northern Ireland a chance of voting on this EU Constitution.

In June the German Constitutional Court laid down that the basic principles of democracy required that there should be parliamentary control of how Government Ministers from the EU Member States exercised various implementing powers under the Lisbon Treaty – for example the “simplified revision procedure” of Article 48 TEU whereby policy areas can be shifted from unanimity to majority voting without need of new Treaties or referendums.

Germany instituted such parliamentary controls in September. Ireland has done so in the Constitutional Amendment people voted for yesterday. Similar parliamentary controls should now be sought through Court actions in as many EU countries as possible in the interest of defending what is left of democracy in Europe.

If Lisbon however should go through and come into force for all 27 States, giving the post-Lisbon EU the constitutional form of a Federation and turning 500 million people into real EU citizens for the first time without their being asked, that is bound to make the question of national independence and democracy the main issue of European politics for years and possibly decades to come – not least in Ireland, whose modern political history has been largely a struggle against the drawbacks of its people being made citizens of another country.

The Lisbon Two referendum has exposed the moral and political bankruptcy of Ireland’s main political parties. There is a vacuum in Irish politics, as there is in many other EU countries, when all the “Establishment” political parties line up on one side and so many of the country’s citizens are on the other.

Across Europe huge numbers of citizens are not being properly represented by those who have been elected to represent them. The coming period in history will see many attempts to fill this political vacuum, in Ireland and elsewhere.

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Open Letter to the Referendum Commission

Posted on 29 September, 2009 by NationalPlatform.Org

Below for your information is a copy of the  letter that was delivered to Mr Justice Frank Clarke, Chairman of the Referendum Commission, from Anthony Coughlan last Thursday, with the most relevant passages highlighted in bold …

 

 

Sunday 27 September 2009

_______

 

TO:

MrJustice Frank Clarke

Chairman,

The Referendum Commission

18 Lower Leeson St.

Dublin 2

 

FROM:

Anthony Coughlan

The National Platform EU Research and Information Centre

24 Crawford Avenue

Dublin 9

Tel.:  01-8305792

 

Thursday 24 September 2009

 

Dear Mr Justice Clarke

May I enclose for your information a copy of the new edition of the Lisbon Treaty: The Readable Version, the first edition of which I sent you and your Referendum Commission colleagues some time ago. I also enclose a document which describes the main changes the Lisbon Treaty would make.

 

May I take the opportunity  of saying that the current Lisbon referendum, as I presume you have noted,  has been characterized by monstrous illegality on the part of several key parties, as follows:-

1. The intervention of the European Commission, which is unlawful under European law, as the Commission has no function in relation to the ratification of new Treaties,  something that is exclusively a matter for the Member States under their own constitutional procedures;

 

2. The part-funding of the posters and press advertisements  of  most of Ireland’s Yes-side political parties by their sister parties in the European Parliament, even though it is illegal under Irish law to receive donations from sources outside the country in a referendum and when, under EU law, money provided by the European Parliament to cross-national political parties is supposed to be confined to informational-type  material and to avoid direct partisan advocacy. I read that the Green Party has refused such funding from its sister party in the European Parliament on the ground that it is advised that this is illegal under European law   (Later comment on this latter point inserted  by A.Coughlan:

Presumably this scrupulousness is because  Green Party Local Government Minister

John Gormley, as Minister responsible for running the referendum, cannot afford to

have the political party he belongs to flout the law!)

 

3. The Government’s unlawful use of public funds in circulating to voters a postcard with details of the so-called “assurances” from the European Council,  followed by a brochure some time later containing a tendentious summary of the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty – both steps being in breach of the Supreme Court’s 1995 judgement in McKenna that it is unconstitutional of the Government to use public money to seek to procure a particular result in a referendum;

 

4. The failure of your own Referendum Commission to carry out its statutory function under the 1998 and 2001 Referendum Acts of preparing for citizens a statement or statements “containing a general explanation of the subject matter of the proposal (viz. the proposal to amend the Constitution)  and of the text thereof in the relevant Bill”, namely the 28th Amendment of the Constitution Bill 2009.

 

May I make some points to you and your Referendum Commission colleagues regarding this.

 

The Lisbon Treaty-Your Guide which you have circulated to voters makes no attempt to inform them about the proposed Constitutional Amendment, despite that being your prime statutory duty and that of your Referendum Commission colleagues under the Referendum Acts.

The leaflet and other material which you have made available do not tell citizen-voters  that the new first sentence of the proposed Amendment we shall be voting on  provides that the State

“affirms its commitment to the European Union” which would be established by the Lisbon Treaty – a sentence, incidentally,  that was not in the Constitutional Amendment in last year’s referendum – and  you give voters no idea that this is the case or what such a commitment might entail.

 

You do not inform voters that the second and third sentences of the proposed Amendment make clear that ratifying the Lisbon Treaty would abolish the European Community which Ireland joined in 1973 and  would establish in its place a new European Union on the basis of the Lisbon Treaty which would be constitutionally very different from the European Union that we are currently members of, or what that difference might be.

Nowhere in the Referendum Commission’s information material that you have sent to voters do you advert to the  fact that the Lisbon Treaty would confer on Irish citizens  an “additional” citizenship of the post-Lisbon European Union,  with associated citizens’ rights and duties vis-à-vis that Union, and what the implications of such a change might be.

 

One would think that there could be be few things more constitutionally important for citizens than being endowed with an additional citizenship. Yet you and your Commission say absolutely nothing about it in the “information” material you have circulated  – in violation of the provisions of the Act which gives you your authority.

 

You say nothing  about how the rights and duties that we would have as real citizens of  the constitutionally  new European Union which the Lisbon Treaty would establish would relate to our rights and duties as Irish citizens in the event of any conflicts arising between the two; or how the “additional” citizenship that Lisbon would endow us with differs from our essentially notional and symbolical EU “citizenship” of today.

 

It is clear that such a dereliction of duty on your part and that of your fellow Commissioners amounts to constitutional delinquency of a high order, as well as being a gross misuse of the ¤4 million of public money that you have been entrusted with. It will be interesting to see how future historians assess your actions.

 

As for yourself personally, instead of doing the job which the Referendum Acts impose on you, you have arrogated to yourself the task of answering questions on the Lisbon Treaty on the radio and in the press,  in which you give your personal opinions and judgements, whereas all statements by the Commission should be collectively agreed by its members, as the Referendum Acts clearly envisage.

 

In no way do the Referendum Acts authorise you to do the “solo runs” on radio and in the press that you have undertaken.  Your predecessor, retired Chief Justice TA Finlay, who was an exemplary chairman of the Referendum Commission between 1998 and 2002, would never have permitted this.

 

Some of the oral statements you have made, moreover, have been either false or misleading. From several l examples I could give, I quote two. A fortnight ago you accepted in response to a question on Morning Ireland that the right of Member State governments to “propose” and decide their National Commissioner would be changed by the Lisbon Treaty  into a right to make “suggestions” only,  effectively for the incoming Commission President to decide -  that key person’s appointment being in the gift of the Big States.

 

You added the rider however that you did not think this change was of much consequence.  You must be aware from previous private correspondence that I had with the Referendum Commission on behalf of my colleagues in our EU Research and Information Centre that many people on the No-side consider this be a Lisbon Treaty amendment of considerable consequence.  One way or another, its consequences are clearly a matter of political judgement which it is not your job as Referendum Commission chairman to make.

 

Last Friday I heard you state on Morning Ireland that the difference between the “additional” citizenship that we would have of  the post-Lisbon European Union and the notional or symbolical “complementary” EU citizenship we are said to have today was “of no great consequence” either, or words to that effect.  Yet the most cursory acquaintance with the constitutional changes which the Lisbon Treaty and the Constitutional Amendment to ratify it would bring about, shows that this is just not true.  Lisbon is the old Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe after all which the French and Dutch rejected in 2005, even if it implements that Constitution for Europe indirectly rather than directly.

 

You and your Referendum Commission colleagues still have some time left in which to fulfil your statutory function under the Referendum Acts that set you up. You still have a few days in which to do your duty to the Irish people whom you are profoundly failing at present, as they face their historic decision of next Friday with virtually nothing from you and your Referendum Commission colleagues which might give them “the general explanation of the subject matter” of  the Constitutional Amendment “and of its text”, on which they will be voting, as the Referendum Act requires.

 

On behalf of citizens all over the country who are deeply disquieted by the Referendum Commission’s failure to provide information on how the Lisbon Treaty would affect the Consitution, may I appeal to you to do that duty still and to carry out your statutory function under the Referendum Acts.

 

Yours sincerely

 

Anthony Coughlan

 

Director

President, Foundation for EU Democracy, Brussels

 

 

PS.  I intend to release this letter to the media this weekend and to circulate it widely to Irish opinion-leaders.

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Would you eat this?

Posted on 23 September, 2009 by NationalPlatform.Org

Would You Eat This Treaty?

Filed under: Lisbon Treaty, Lisbon Treaty Referendum | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

⁂ German judgement is a call to action against the EU’s democratic deficit

Posted on 24 July, 2009 by NationalPlatform.Org

JENS-PETER BONDE
(EUObserver/Comment)
24 July 2009

The German Constitutional Court issued a remarkable verdict on 30 June. It was described in the press as the Court’s approval of the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.

However, careful reading of the judgement shows that it is a fundamental rejection of the core constitutional content of the Treaty.

The Court judgement modifies the most important principle of the primacy of European law. Member States are said to be the “masters of the Treaties.” In the Court’s view the EU institutions have no powers of their own. They can only administer delegated competences in prescribed areas. European law is stated to be ultimately based on and limited by the accession law of each Member State.

The German Court implicitly invites any citizen, political party or business firm in Germany to take court cases before the German Constitutional Court if they find that a piece of proposed EU law is outside those delegated competences. Then it is the German Court that will decide – not the EU Court.

This is a rejection of Art. 344 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which provides that Member States undertake not to submit a dispute concerning the interpretation or application of the Treaties to any method of settlement other than the European Court of Justice.

The Karlsruhe Court also insists that there must be important areas of law-making and decision-taking left to the EU Member States. This is an invitation to politicians everywhere to ask their governments what competences are left with the Member States after the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty.

I have offered a bottle of top class wine to anyone who can give me just one example of a national law which cannot be touched in some way by the Lisbon Treaty. Legal specialists have tried to find examples; yet they cannot!

If EU governments cannot find room for the exercise of meaningful national parliamentary democracy within the ambit of the EU, then the Lisbon Treaty is unconstitutional, according to the German Court.

The Court does not accept that the European Parliament is a body which can give adequate democratic legitimacy to European Union law. The Court also sets limits to the importance of the new “additional” Union citizenship and states that this can only be supplementary to national citizenship.

The Court insists on national parliamentary participation in all areas where Member States would lose their right of veto.

The judges unanimously insist, by 8 votes to nil, on prior approval by the German Parliament – and implicitly by other National Parliaments – for the use of the so-called “bridge articles” whereby Government Ministers on the Council of Ministers or the European Council can alter EU law-making from unanimity to qualified majority voting.

The judges also require full participation of National Parliaments in the use of the flexibility clause in Art. 352 TFEU, which permits the EU to take action and adopt measures to attain one of the EU’s objectives even if the Treaties have not provided the necessary powers.

Finally, the Court forbids the German President from signing the Treaty so as to enable Germany’s instrument of ratification to be deposited in Rome until the German Parliament has adopted a law which would safeguard the involvement of the German Bundestag and Bundesrat in future EU decision-making.

The most striking element in the judgement is that the Court implies the need for the involvement of National Parliaments in all aspects of EU law-making. They refer to democracy as being a principle common to all the EU Member States. The involvement of National Parliaments in EU law-making is therefore a necessity. If not, the principle of democracy will have been fundamentally breached.

Recognising the democratic deficit

The Karlsruhe Court effectively finds that the Lisbon Treaty would increase the EU’s widely acknowledged democratic deficit if its ratification is not linked to the adoption of internal procedures at Member State level such as to safeguard the involvement of the National Parliaments and voters in each Member State.

The verdict applies only to Germany, of course. But it has significant implications for all Member States, including those which have already approved and ratified the Lisbon Treaty.

With this Court judgement in hand, political parties and groups of citizens in each Member State are implicitly invited to go to their National Parliaments and insist on similar guarantees being given in order to ensure the involvement of elected representatives and voters in EU decision-making in each one.

If Germany’s ratification of the Lisbon Treaty is found to be illegal and in contravention of basic democratic principles in the absence of such parliamentary controls, should not the same principle apply in all other Member States that claim to be democracies?

The Karlsruhe judgement should inspire people to call for similar constitutional and parliamentary challenges in other EU countries. This may establish strengthened procedures for national parliamentary control and safeguard areas where national parliamentary democracies can decide things on their own without interference from, for example, the EU Court of Justice.

Such calls may also win time to make people aware of the anti-democratic character of the Lisbon Treaty and ensure that this is not ratified by all EU States before it has been approved by Irish voters in their referendum re-run on 2 October next, and can be put later before British voters in a referendum in the United Kingdom.

The United Kingdom must have a general election before June next year. The Conservative Party, which is likely to win that election, has pledged to withdraw the United Kingdom’s ratification of the Lisbon Treaty on its first day in office if the Treaty has not come into force by then for all 27 EU States. It has then pledged to hold a referendum on it and to recommend a No vote to the British people.

There needs to be a democratic review of the Lisbon Treaty in all EU countries before any such encounter with UK voters.

(The author was MEP 1979 – 2008 and served as a member of the Convention on the Future of Europe)

Excerpts from the German Constitutional Court judgement in the English version published by the Court, 30 June 2009.

“European unification on the basis of a union of sovereign states under the Treaties may not be realised in such a way that the Member States do not retain sufficient room for the political formation of the economic, cultural and social circumstances of life.” (Headnotes to the Judgement, Par. 3)

“It is therefore constitutionally required not to agree dynamic treaty provisions with a blanket character or if they can still be interpreted in a manner that respects national responsibility for integration, to establish, at any rate, suitable national safeguards for the effective exercise of such responsibility.” (Par.239)

“European unification on the basis of a union of sovereign states under the Treaties may not be realised in such a way that the Member States do not retain sufficient space for the political formation of the economic, cultural and social circumstances of life. This applies in particular to areas which shape the citizens’ circumstances of life, in particular the private space of their own responsibility and of political and social security, which is protected by the fundamental rights, and to political decisions that particularly depend on previous understanding as regards culture, history and language and which unfold in discourses in the space of a political public that is organised by party politics and Parliament. Essential areas of democratic formative action comprise, inter alia, citizenship. the civil and military monopoly on the use of force, revenue and expenditure including external financing and all elements of encroachment that are decisive for the realisation of fundamental rights, above all as regards intensive encroachments on fundamental rights such as the deprivation of liberty in the administration of criminal law or the placement in an institution. These important areas also include cultural issues such as the disposition of language, the shaping of circumstances concerning the family and education, the ordering of the freedom of opinion, of the press and of association and the dealing with the profession of faith or ideology.” (Par. 249)

“Consequently, the Treaty of Lisbon does not alter the fact that the Bundestag as the body of representation of the German people is the focal point of an interweaved democratic system.” (Par. 277)

“… the European Parliament is not a body of representation of a sovereign European people.” (Par.280)

“The deficit of European public authority that exists when measured against requirements on democracy in states cannot be compensated by other provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon and to that extent, it cannot be justified.” (Par.289)

“As regards the legal situation according to the Treaty of Lisbon, this consideration confirms that without democratically originating in the Member States, the action of the European Union lacks a sufficient basis of legitimisation.” (Par.297)

“Finally, the Treaty of Lisbon does not vest the European Union with provisions that provide the European union of integration (Integrationsverband) with the competence to decide its own competence (Kompetenz-Kompetenz).” (Par.322)

“With Declaration No.17 Concerning Primacy annexed to the Treaty of Lisbon, the Federal Republic of Germany does not recognise an absolute primacy of application of Union law, which would be constitutionally objectionable, but merely confirms the legal situation as it has been interpreted by the Federal Constitutional Court. . .” (Par. 331)

“After the realisation of the principle of the sovereignty of the people in Europe, only the peoples of the Member States can dispose of their respective constituent powers and of the sovereignty of the state. Without the expressly declared will of the peoples, the elected bodies are not competent to create a new subject of legitimisation, or to delegitimise the existing ones, in the constitutional areas of their states.” (Par. 347)

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☘Explanatory document on Lisbon

Posted on 9 July, 2009 by NationalPlatform.Org

Facts on the Lisbon Treaty

Millions of Europeans support us: By voting No we remain full members of the EU and of the euro currency based on the existing Nice Treaty, but we reject the proposed Lisbon Treaty as a step too far. Millions of  our fellow Europeans who are being denied referendums on Lisbon by their politicians are hoping that we will say No again for their sakes. We can thereby open the way for a better Treaty for a better and more democratic Europe.

The economic crisis: All 27 EU Members are in economic crisis. Ireland is worse than most because of  the borrowing binge, housing bubble and Bank bail-outs which were encouraged by the same golden circle of  politicians and bankers as are now bringing us Lisbon Two. The crisis makes Lisbon’s model of a deregulated, privatised, let-it-rip EU economy quite out-of-date.  Lisbon’s proposal to give the Big States from 50-100% more voting power in the EU, while halving Ireland’s voting power to 0.8% would be economically disastrous for us in face of the economic crisis, as Brussels, Frankfurt  and the Big EU States insist on savage cut-backs  being imposed on the Irish economy.

We remain full EU members: There is no question of Ireland being sidelined or pushed out of the EU or the euro-currency if we stand by our No to Lisbon. As Ireland’s EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy said in Hot Press last December:

“There is no provision in the existing treaties to isolate anybody. There is no provision to throw out anybody, unless unanimously all the existing members of the club agreed to throw you out. And I doubt, now or in the future, any Irish Government is going to unanimously agree to throw themselves out.”

Exactly the same Lisbon Treaty: Not a dot or comma of the Lisbon Treaty will be changed for Lisbon Two. If Lisbon comes into force it will be interpreted by the EU Court of Justice and not on the basis of political declarations by the EU Prime Ministers and Presidents.  These do not change anything in the Treaty and are not legally binding as part of EU law. Promises of changes to suit Ireland in some future EU Treaty cannot pull back on anything in the Lisbon Treaty once it is in force. The EU Prime Ministers state that they “will clarify but not change either the content or the application of the Treaty of Lisbon”, which only the EU Court can decide on (Summit Conclusions 19-6-2009).

As pro-Lisbon journalist James Downey has written: “The antis are right about one thing, if one thing only. Any guarantees we may get on their concerns will be irrelevant, or worthless, or both.” (Irish Independent, 21-3-2009)

Overturning the people’s vote: The Lisbon Treaty is the new legal form of the EU Constitution which French and Dutch voters rejected in their 2005 referendums.  Irish voters rejected it in last year’s referendum by 53% to 47%.  All genuine democrats, including Yes-side voters, should respect that vote as the French and Dutch Governments did.  Respecting it would have meant Taoiseach Brian Cowen telling his EU partners that Ireland could not ratify Lisbon because the Irish people had voted No to it, so  there was no point in their continuing to ratify it as EU Treaties must be unanimous. Instead Taoiseach Cowen and Foreign Minister Martin told the other EU Governments on the morning of last year’s count to ignore their own people’s vote and to  continue with ratifying Lisbon.They persuaded their EU colleagues that they could get the Irish people to overturn their democratic No vote  in a second referendum on exactly the same Treaty, if they got enough support from France, Germany etc. in the form of statements about Ireland’s concerns, even though the Treaty is unchanged.

Turning the EU into a State: Lisbon would be a giant step in turning the EU into a supranational Federal-style State, in which Ireland would effectively be reduced to regional or provincial status.  It would give Government Ministers and the Big EU States huge new powers, while taking power away from ordinary citizens across the EU, and from the National Parliaments they elect. Because of our Constitution, only Ireland is being allowed a vote on it. Only we Irish can save democracy in the EU by refusing to allow ourselves be pressurised into overturning our rejection of Lisbon in 2008. If we vote No again in Lisbon Two we hold the door open to our fellow countrymen and women in Northern Ireland and give them the chance of having a say in a UK referendum next year.

Denying citizens a vote: France’s President Sarkozy and  EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy have admitted that if Lisbon were put to referendum in other EU countries their voters would reject it too.  Although opinion polls show that people in most Member States want to decide for themselves whether they should be put under an EU Constitution which would override their National Constitutions, the EU Prime Ministers refused to allow referendums. This does not bode well for the future of democracy in the EU.

A UK Referendum: There is now a race in time between the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, which would greatly increase the power of  the Big States and the  Brussels Commission in the EU, and the coming to office of a  new Government in Britain by next May.  Labour’s Gordon Brown broke Tony Blair’s promise to give the British people a referendum.  David Cameron’s  policy is to hold a referendum on Lisbon in the UK and recommend a No vote to it to the British people – so long as  we Irish do not change our No vote of last year and thereby bring Lisbon and the new undemocratic EU it would create into being for all 27 EU Member States first.

These are the main reasons why Lisbon is a bad Treaty for Ireland and for the EU.  It would -

1. Be  a power-grab by the Big States for control of the EU. At present EU laws are made by a simple majority of Member States (14 out of 27), so long as  between them  they have  a qualified majority of 255 votes out of 345. Under this Nice Treaty system the Big States have 29 votes each and Ireland has 7, one quarter of each Big State. Under Lisbon future EU laws would be made by 55% of Member States, i.e. 15 out of 27, so long as they have 65% of the total EU population between them. By basing EU law-making primarily on population size, the Lisbon Treaty would double Germany’s relative voting strength on the EU Council of Ministers from its present 8% of the total votes to 17% on a population  basis, and increase  France’s, Britain’s and Italy’s by half,  from 8% to 12%  – while halving Ireland’s vote from 2% to 0.8% (Art.16, Treaty on European Union / TEU).  How does having 0.8% of a vote in making EU laws put us “at the heart of Europe”?  Taoiseach Brian Cowen’s “guarantees” do not explain how having half as much influence in the EU as Ireland has today would induce other Member States to listen to our concerns on unemployment and help to resolve the economic crisis  in the interest of Irish companies, workers and farmers. (*See Note 1 below on the  voting rules for making EU laws)

2. Copperfasten the Laval and related judgements of the EU Court of Justice, which  put the competition rules of the EU market  above the right of Trade Unions to enforce pay standards higher than the minimum wage for migrant workers. At the same time Lisbon would give the EU full control of immigration policy (Art.79 TFEU). This combination threatens the pay and working conditions of many Irish people. A Protocol in a new Treaty different from Lisbon would be needed to set aside the recent Laval, Rüffert and other EU Court judgements, but the EU Prime Ministers refused that.

3. Permit the post-Lisbon EU to impose Europe-wide taxes directly on us for the first time without need of further Treaties or referendums (Art.311 TFEU). This could be any kind of tax – income tax, sales tax, property tax -  so long as it was  unanimously agreed by EU Governments. If Lisbon were to be ratified,  Government Ministers would have every incentive to agree to give the EU much increased “own resources” by introducing its own taxes to finance the many new functions the EU would obtain under the Treaty.

4. Amend the existing treaties to  give the EU exclusive power as regards rules on foreign direct investment (Arts.206-7 TFEU) and give the Court of Justice the power to order the harmonisation of national indirect taxes it it decides that they cause a“distortion of competition” in the EU market (Art.113 TFEU).  This amendment and the new Protocol No. 27 on the Internal Market and Competition would  strengthen the hand of the Court in using the EU’s internal market rules to subvert Ireland’s low 12.5% company tax rate, which is the principal reason foreign firms come to Ireland and stay here when they come. Compare Germany’s 30% company  tax rate. Commission plans for a harmonised tax base in the EU,  the precursor of harmonised tax rates, have been put on the back-burner until after Lisbon Two for fear they would alarm Irish voters.

5. The Commission, which is appointed not elected, has the monopoly of proposing all European laws. The Lisbon Treaty would abolish our present right to “propose” and decide who Ireland’s Commissioner is, by replacing it with a right to make”suggestions” only, leaving it up to the incoming Commission President to decide (Art.17.7 TEU; cf.Art.214 TEC). Our No vote of last year secured us a commitment to a permanent Commissioner, but what is the point of every EU State continuing to have its own Commissioner post-Lisbon when it can no longer decide who that Commissioner will be?  Under the present Nice Treaty Ireland would continue to decide who should be our Commissioner, and can continue to have an Irish Commissioner indefinitely as well.  (*See Note 2 below explaining how).

6. Give the legally new EU which  it would establish its own State Constitution, which would be superior to the Irish and other national Constitutions. Lisbon would abolish the existing European Community which Ireland joined in 1973 and transfer all of its powers and institutions to the new post-Lisbon Union.  It would give the European Union its own legal personality for the first time, which would be constitutionally separate from and superior to its 27 Member States, so that it could sign international Treaties with other States in all areas of its powers (Arts.1 and 47 TEU; Declaration No.17 concerning Primacy). This post-Lisbon EU would have the same name but would be constitutionally very different from the present EU, which was founded by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.

In constitutional terms Lisbon would thereby turn Ireland into a regional or provincial state within this new Federal-style Union, with the EU’s Constitution and laws having legal primacy over the Irish Constitution and laws in any cases of conflict between the two. The EU Court of Justice, as the Supreme Court of the new post-Lisbon Union,  would decide such conflicts. Constitutionally and in the eyes of others this would be the end of Ireland’s position as an independent sovereign State in the international community of States. Although we would retain some of the trappings of independent statehood from pre-Lisbon days, in reality we would be more like a regional or provincial state such as Bavaria inside Federal Germany or Massachussetts or Texas inside the USA. From the inside the EU would seem to be based on a Treaty between States, but from the outside it would look like a State itself. The only major power of a State which the post-Lisbon European Union would lack would be the power to force its members to go to war against their will, although they could go to war voluntarily on the EU’s behalf.   (*See Notes 3 and 5 below on the constitutional revolution the Lisbon Treaty would bring about)

7. Turn us all into real citizens for the first time of this new post-Lisbon European Union, owing obedience to its laws and loyalty to its authority over and above our obedience and loyalty to Ireland and the Irish Constitution and laws in the event of any conflict between the two.  One can only be a citizen of a State. and all States must have citizens. Article 9 TEU would give us an “additional” EU citizenship, on top of our Irish citizenship.  This would  be a real EU citizenship for the first time, with associated citizens’ rights and duties, and would be quite different from the notional or symbolical EU “citizenship” of today.  We would still retain our Irish citizenship, but it would be subordinate to our EU citizenship in any case of conflict between the two, as is the case with citizens of such Federal States as Germany, the USA, Switzerland,  Canada. The EU Court of Justice would decide on any such conflicts. (*See Note 4 below)

8. Give the EU Court of Justice the power to decide our rights as EU citizens by making the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding for the first time (Art.6 TEU).  The Charter includes such rights as free speech, the right to fair trial, the right to life, the rights of the child, the right to strike, property rights etc. – all of them rights we already have under the Irish Constitution, but which it would  fall to the EU Court of Justice, not Ireland’s courts, to interpret and decide for people in their capacity as  citizens of the post-Lisbon EU if Lisbon should be ratified. This would  enable the EU judges to  use its case-law to lay down a uniform standard of rights for the 500 million citizens of the post-Lisbon Union in the name of  a common EU citizenship in the years and decades to come.  It would open the possibility of clashes with national human rights standards in sensitive areas where Member States differ from one another at present, e.g. trial by jury, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, habeas corpus, the legalisation of hard drugs, euthanasia, abortion, labour law, succession law, marriage law, children’s rights etc. Ireland’s Supreme Court and the  Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg would no longer have the final say on what our rights are.

9. Ireland would lose the national veto it has at present by handing over to the EU the power to make laws binding on us in 32 new policy areas, including public services, crime, justice and policing, immigration, energy, transport, tourism, sport, culture, public health, the EU budget and international measures on  climate change (Art.191 TFEU).   The Dáil and Irish voters who elect the Dáil would no longer decide laws or policy for the areas transferred. (*See Note 6 below on the respective law-making powers of the EU and its Member States after Lisbon.)

10. Reduce the power of National Parliaments to make laws in  relation to 49 policy areas or matters, and increase the influence of the European Parliament in making EU laws in 19 new  areas (See euabc.eu/Heeger II for the two detailed lists). Lisbon would entitle one-third of the National Parliaments or 1 million EU citizens to request the EU Commission to propose a new EU law or to abandon a proposed law, but the Commission need not accede to any such request (Art.11.4 TEU; Protocol No. 2 on Subsidiarity and Proportionality). Lisbon underlines the implicitly subordinate role of National Parliaments in the institutional structure of  the post-Lisbon Union by laying down that “National Parliaments contribute actively to the good functioning of the Union” by various means that are set out in Art.12 TEU. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), who at present  are “representatives of the peoples of the Member States brought together in the Community” (Art.189 TEC), would under Lisbon become “representatives of the Union’s citizens” (Art.14 TEU).  This change illustrates the constitutional revolution Lisbon would bring about.

11. Be a self-amending Treaty which would permit the EU Prime Ministers and Presidents to shift most remaining EU policy areas where unanimity is required and a national veto still exists – e.g. on tax harmonisation   -  to  qualified majority voting on the Council of Ministers, without need of further EU Treaties or referendums (Art.48.7 TEU).  In  addition, the so-called “Flexibility Clause”, which allows the EU to take action  and adopt measures to attain one of the EU’s objectives even if “the Treaties have not provided the necessary powers,” would be extended by Lisbon to all areas of the Treaty and not just the internal market rules as before (Art.352 TFEU). This would open the floodgates to more political integration, i.e. centralisation,  by means of this article, which is already widely used.

12. Enable the 27 EU Prime Ministers and Presidents to appoint an EU President for up to five years without allowing voters any say as to who he or she would be – thereby abolishing the present six-monthly rotating EU presidencies (Art.15.5 TEU).  Appointment rather than democratic election to this and other top  EU jobs, such as the proposed EU “Foreign Minister”/ High Representative (Art.21.3 TEU),  typifies the undemocratic nature of the proposed Lisbon Constitution.  It is the Prime Ministers and Presidents of the Big States who would have the key say in these appointments because of the big increase in their voting power under Lisbon.

13. Militarize the EU further, requiring Member States “progressively to improve their military capabilities” (Art.42.3 TEU) and to aid and assist other Member States experiencing armed attack “by all the means in their power” (Art.42.7 TEU).

Explanatory Notes

*Note 1: Voting to make EU laws: When Ireland joined the then EEC in 1973 Germany, France, Britain and Italy had 10 votes each in making European laws and Ireland had 3 – one-third that of the Big States.  Under the present Nice Treaty the Big States have 29 votes each and Ireland has 7 – one  quarter of the Big States. Under Lisbon Germany’s votes would be 20 times Ireland’s, for it has 80 million people as against Ireland’s 4 million, and France, Britain and Italy, with their average populations of  60 million,  would each have 15 times more votes than Ireland.  Germany and France between them have one-third of the EU’s population of near 500 million. Under the Lisbon rules they would need only two small countries to vote with them to block any EU law they did not like. (The present voting rules are set out in Art. 205 TEC and the Declaration on EU Enlargement. The Lisbon rules are in Art. 238 TFEU).

*Note 2: Keeping Ireland’s Commissioner under Nice: The Nice Treaty requires the number of Commissioners to be fewer than the number of Member States from 2009, without specifying a number, and any change must be agreed unanimously (Art.4, Protocol on Enlargement). This can be done by reducing the number of Commissioners from 27 to 26, which would mean Ireland would lose its Commissioner once every 135 years. Alternatively, the country whose national is given the job of EU Foreign Minister could be represented by that person on the Commission. So there would be no need for any country to lose a Commissioner under Nice, unless they were compensated by having one of their nationals given this more important job instead.

*Note 3: Ireland’s proposed Constitutional Amendment: The first sentence of the proposed Constitutional Amendment which Irish voters rejected last summer and which they are being asked to change their minds on in October, recognises that Lisbon would establish a legally new European Union which would have the same name but would politically and constitutionally be very different from the present Nice/Maastricht Treaty-based EU:

“The State may ratify the Treaty of Lisbon signed at Lisbon on the 13th day of December 2007, and  may be a  member of the European Union established by virtue of that Treaty.    No provision of this Constitution invalidates laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by the State that are necessitated by membership of the European Union, or prevents laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by  the said European Union or by institutions thereof, or by bodies competent under the treaties referred  to in this section, from having the force of law in the State.” (emphasis added)

*Note 4: EU Citizenship: Under the present Nice Treaty EU citizenship is stated to “complement” national citizenship (Art.17 TEC). This is purely notional or symbolical, for  the present EU is not a State, and one can only be a citizen of a State. Neither does the present EU have legal personality, so that it cannot have individuals as members. All that would change with Lisbon, which would make citizenship of the constitutionally new Union “additional to” national citizenship (Art. 9 TEU). This would be a real Federal citizenship with associated rights and duties vis-à-vis the new EU, with all the implications of that. In classical Federations such as the USA or 19th century Germany, both sovereignty and dual citizenships are divided between the federal and the regional / provincial levels.

*Note 5:  Lisbon’s Constitutional Revolution: The Lisbon Treaty proposes to “constitute” or establish a legally new European Union while retaining the same name, by amending the two existing European Treaties rather than by replacing these completely with a formally titled “Constitution”, as the Treaty which the French and Dutch  rejected in their 2005 referendums sought to do (See the first sentence of the  Irish Constitutional Amendment above and Arts.1 and 47 TEU for proof of this).   When the French and Dutch rejected this Constitutional Treaty, the EU Prime Ministers and Presidents decided to get a Federal-style EU Constitution through indirectly rather than directly without using the word “Constitution”, for they realised that talk of EU Constitutions alarmed people and made too obvious the constitutional revolution being proposed. The result is the Lisbon Treaty.

Because the Lisbon Treaty consists of a long series of amendments to the two existing European Treaties, one can only understand what it would do by referring to the latter Treaties as they would be if amended by Lisbon. This document does that.  The Constitution of the proposed  post-Lisbon European Union would therefore be the two existing European Treaties as they would be when and if they are amended by the Lisbon Treaty.  These would be the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the Union (TFEU). The two Treaties would have the same legal value (Art.1 TEU).  The second of these, the Treaty on the Functioning of the Union, would be the new name for the present second Treaty, the Treaty Establishing the European Community (TEC), for  Lisbon would abolish the existing European Community which  Ireland joined in 1973.

In legal content and effect the Lisbon Treaty is virtually 100% the same as the Constitutional Treaty which the French and Dutch rejected. Both Treaties would abolish the existing European Community and the Nice/Maastricht-based European Union and establish in their place a constitutionally new European Union with its own legal personality, which would be legally separate from and superior to its Member States for the first time.  Lisbon, like its predecessor, would then confer a real “additional” EU citizenship, with accompanying EU citizens’ rights and duties, on the 500 million citizens of the 27 Member States, without  most of them being aware of it or being allowed any direct say on it.  At the same time the same name, “The European Union”, would be retained for the post-Lisbon EU as for the existing Nice/Maastricht-based EU, even though the new Union’s constitutional-political character would be fundamentally changed.

Those pushing this great deception hope that the media and ordinary citizens  in the  27 Member States  will not notice the constitutional revolution which Lisbon seeks to bring about -  for the EU itself and for its Member States – until after it is accomplished.   People are to be sleep-walked into becoming citizens of a Federal-style EU without knowing it.  Hence the decision of the EU Prime Ministers and Presidents in 2005 to avoid referendums on this proposed constitutional/political  revolution at all costs, in case people might be alerted and protest.

* Note 6: EU powers and Member State powers: In some policy areas the EU has exclusive powers to make laws for its Member States, so that they can no longer legislate for those areas (Art.3 TFEU). These areas are the customs Union, competition rules for the internal market, interest rate and exchange rate policy for  the eurozone countries, fisheries conservation, the common commercial policy and trade treaties.  In most policy areas the EU exercises shared powers with its Member States.  These areas are the internal market, some areas of social policy, economic, social  and territorial cohesion, environment, consumer protection, transport, trans-European networks, energy, the area of freedom, security and justice, and common safety concerns in public health as defined in the Treaty.  In these areas of shared law-making it is the EU, not the Member States, which decides what can be done. The Lisbon Treaty lays down: “Member States shall exercise their competence to the extent that the Union has not exercised its competence” or “to the extent that the Union has decided to cease exercising its competence” (Art.2 TFEU).  The EU also has independent powers in relation to research, technological development, space, development cooperation and humanitarian aid, without the right to inhibit Member State activity in these areas (Art. 4.3 TFEU).  Lisbon also confers on the EU supporting, coordinating or supplementing powers in relation to the actions of Member States  in protecting and improving human health,  industry, culture, tourism, education, youth, sport and vocational training, civil protection and administrative cooperation (Art.6 TFEU). In addition the EU has its Common Foreign, Security and Defence Policy (Arts.21-46 TEU). It is safe to say that there is no area of State law-making or public policy that would not be either decided, influenced or touched by the EU’s powers after Lisbon. It is unsurprising therefore that  the EU now decides the majority of legal acts for its Member States each year. (For a full  list of the specific powers transferred to the EU level see  euabc.eu – legal analysis  by Klaus Heeger, II)

*    *    *

This document has been prepared by The National Platform EU Research and Information Centre, 24 Crawford Ave., Dublin  9; Tel: 01-8305792; Web-site: nationalplatform.org;  Director Anthony Coughlan.  It has been checked for legal accuracy with authorities on European and Irish constitutional law.

Please feel free to  use and adapt it as you see fit, without any need of  reference to or acknowledgement of its source.  Please photocopy it and distribute it to others so as to  inform people how Ireland’s pro-Lisbon politicians – some wittingly, some unwittingly -  are out to do profound damage to our political and economic interests in the EU by seeking to overturn last year’s Lisbon Treaty referendum result.

We are an entirely voluntary body and depend on citizens’ donations for our work. To help this, and to enable us spread this information more widely, please send what donation you can to our address above, making cheques out to Bank of Ireland Account No. 30081817.
For useful  non-partisan material on the Lisbon Treaty and all aspects of  the EU, see the Dictionary/Lexicon  of EU terms and associated data and linked internet items at euabc.eu

July 2009

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☘Summary of 13 things the Lisbon Treaty would do

Posted on 9 July, 2009 by NationalPlatform.Org

The Lisbon Treaty Re-run – 13 Key Facts

On Friday 2 October we will be voting on exactly the same Lisbon Treaty as Irish voters rejected last year. Not a dot or comma of it will have been changed. These are the main things Lisbon would lead to:

1. A RADICAL SHIFT OF CONTROL TO THE BIG STATES OVER THE EU: Lisbon would halve Ireland’s vote in making EU laws from 2% to 0.9%, while doubling Germany’s vote to 16% and increasing the vote of France, Britain and Italy from 8% each to 12% each. Lisbon would thereby base EU law-making in future on exact population size, just as in a single unified State.

At present EU laws are made on the basis of a “double majority” system – a simple majority of the 27 EU States (14 or more), as long as between them they have a weighted majority of 255 out of a total of 345 votes (Art.205 TEC*; Declaration on Enlargement). Under this system the Big States have 29 votes each and Ireland has 7.

Under Lisbon EU laws would be made by a majority of States (at least 55%, 15 or more), as long as they have 65% of the total EU population between them (Art.16 TEU). This change would double Germany’s voting power in making EU laws from its present 8% to 16%, increase Britain’s, France’s and Italy’s from their present 8% each to 12% each, while halving Ireland’s vote from 2% to 0.9% on the latest official EU population figures for 2009.

Instead of the Big States having 4 times Ireland’s voting weight, as now, under Lisbon Germany would have 18 times and France, Britain and Italy 15 times each. The Government’s White Paper writes untruthfully when it speaks of the “change to a double majority voting system in the Council” (p.44). A double majority of States and weighted votes already exists for making EU laws. What Lisbon does is to replace the existing system of weighted votes, which already recognises the larger size of the Big States, by exact population size as the key criterion for future EU law-making – so hugely advantaging the Big EU States at the expense of the small.

The Big Four EU States would between them have half the voting power on the EU Council of Ministers under the post-Lisbon voting rules, as compared with one-third of the weighted votes they have at present.

The new Lisbon-based voting system would also make it much easier for Germany, France and the Brussels Commission to impose sanctions on Ireland, up to and including limitless fines, under the rules of the Eurozone if we fail to get our 12%-of-GDP budget deficit down to the 3% target level for the Eurozone, according to whatever time-limit they should decide.

At present a special majority of two-thirds of the weighted votes of the Eurozone countries is needed to impose an enforcement procedure and sanctions on Eurozone countries that are running excessive budget deficits (Arts.104 and 122 TEC). Under Lisbon, 8 of the 16 Eurozone States, excluding the delinquent State (viz. 55% of the 16), could impose sanctions on a country running what they decide is an excessive deficit – as long as they have 65% of the 300 million Eurozone population between them. The State with the excessive deficit does not have a vote (Arts.126 and 238 TFEU; Protocol No.12 on the Excessive Deficit Procedure). Germany and France between them have nearly half the population of the Eurozone.

If we ratify Lisbon we will thereby be creating an iron rod to be laid across our backs by Germany, France and the Brussels Commission with regard to our budget deficits and general Government finances over the crucial next few years.

2. LOSING THE RIGHT TO DECIDE IRELAND’S COMMISSIONER: Lisbon would abolish our present right to “propose” and decide who Ireland’s Commissioner is (Art 214 TEC), by replacing it with a right to make”suggestions” only, for the incoming Commission President and the Big States to decide (Art.17.7 TEU).

The EU Prime Ministers have promised each State a Commissioner for the time being, but what is the point of us continuing to have an Irish Commissioner post-Lisbon when the Irish Government can no longer decide who that person would be? The Government White Paper makes no mention of this shift from a bottom-up to a top-down appointment process of deciding the members of the Commission.

This change in the mode of deciding on EU Commissioners is the reason why the Big Four EU States were willing to consider losing their own national Commissioner for five years out of every 15 under Lisbon, because they knew that they would have the decisive say in appointing all the other Commissioners through the incoming Commission President, whom they would have the key role in appointing.

Under Nice we can continue to have a permanent Commissioner on a 26-plus-one basis, as Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt recently suggested, and Ireland would continue, moreover, to decide who he or she will be. Under Nice we also have a veto on any change in the number of Commissioners. Under Lisbon we have no such veto.

3. GIVING THE EU THE CONSTITUTIONAL FORM OF A STATE: Lisbon would abolish the European Community which Ireland joined in 1973 and replace it with a legally new European Union in the constitutional form of an EU Federation. This post-Lisbon EU would for the first time be legally fully separate from and superior to its 27 Member States, would sign international treaties with other States in all areas of its powers and would make half or more of our laws each year (Arts.1 and 47 TEU; Declaration 17 concerning Primacy). This is quite evident also from the second sentence of the Irish Constitutional Amendment which is set out in the 28th Amendment of the Constitution Bill, and can be ontained free from Post Offices, Garda stations and Libraries.

In constitutional terms Lisbon would thereby turn Ireland into a regional or provincial state within this new Federal-style European Union, with the EU’s Constitution and laws having legal primacy over the Irish Constitution and laws in any cases of conflict between the two. Ireland would thus formally cease to be a sovereign independent State in its own right in the international community of States, and become like a provincial state inside an EU Federation.

One illustration of the constitutional revolution which Lisbon would bring about is that it would make MEPs, who under the current treaties are “representatives of the peoples of the States brought together in the Community” (Art.189 TEC), into “representatives of the Union’s citizens” (Art.14 TEU).

4. MAKING US INTO REAL EU CITIZENS, WITH CITIZENS’ RIGHTS AND DUTIES VIS-A-VIS THE POST-LISBON EUROPEAN UNION WHICH WOULD HAVE PRIMACY OVER OUR RIGHTS AND DUTIES AS IRISH CITIZENS: Lisbon would confer on us an “additional” citizenship of the constitutionally Federal post-Lisbon European Union, owing obedience to its laws and loyalty to its authority over and above our duty of obedience and loyalty to Ireland and the Irish Constitution and laws in the event of any conflict between the two (Art.9 TEU).

This would be quite different from the notional or symbolic EU citizenship that people speak of today, because Lisbon would transfer the law-making powers of the European Community to the constitutionally new Union which Lisbon would establish, and the Community would be then legally abolished. As real EU citizens for the first time, we would be subject to the refounded Union’s laws and would be expected to give our citizens’ loyalty to the authority of the constitutionally new post-Lisbon Union.

One can only be a citizen of a State and all States must have citizens. The Irish people were not that happy when they were citizens of the UK State from 1800 to 1921. Although as citizens of the post-Lisbon Federal EU we would still keep our Irish citizenship, this would be subordinate to our EU citizenship and to the rights and duties attaching to that in any cases of conflict between the two (Art.9 TEU; Declaration 17 concerning Primacy).

5. THE EU COURT OF JUSTICE WOULD DECIDE OUR RIGHTS AS EU CITIZENS: Lisbon would give the EU Court of Justice the power to decide our human rights by making the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding for the first time (Art.6 TEU). This would give power to the EU judges to lay down a uniform standard of rights for the 500 million citizens of the post-Lisbon Union in the name of their common EU citizenship in the years and decades to come.

This would open the possibility of clashes with national human rights standards in sensitive areas where Member States differ from one another at present, e.g. inheritance and property rights, trial by jury, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus, legalising hard drugs, abortion, euthanasia, labour law, marriage law, children’s rights etc. Ireland’s Supreme Court and the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights would no longer have the final say on what our fundamental rights are.

6. ABOLISHING THE NATIONAL VETO: Lisbon would abolish the national veto which Ireland has at present in over 30 new policy areas by handing over to the EU the power to make laws binding on us as regards public services, crime, justice, policing, immigration, energy, transport, tourism, sport, culture, public health, the EU budget, international moves on climate change etc.

7. REDUCING THE POWER OF NATIONAL PARLIAMENTS: Lisbon would reduce the power of National Parliaments to decide 49 policy areas or matters by shifting their powers to the EU, and increase the influence of the European Parliament in making EU laws in 19 new areas (See euabc.eu for the two lists).

8. A “SELF-AMENDING” TREATY: Lisbon could be regarded as a self-amending Treaty in that it would permit the EU Prime Ministers and Presidents to shift most remaining EU policy areas where unanimity is required and a national veto still exists – for example on tax harmonisation – to qualified majority voting on the EU Council of Ministers, without the need of further EU Treaties or referendums (Art.48 TEU).

Lisbon would also extend the so-called “Flexibility Clause”, which allows the EU to take action and adopt measures to attain one of the EU’s objectives even if “the Treaties have not provided the necessary powers‘”, to all areas of the Treaty and not just the internal market rules as at present (Art.352 TFEU). This would open the floodgates to more political integration, viz. centralisation, by means of this article, which is already widely used.

9. GIVING THE EU ITS OWN TAXES: Lisbon would permit the post-Lisbon EU to impose its own EU-wide taxes directly on us for the first time, on top of national taxes, in order to raise its “own resources” for the EU itself, without the need of further EU Treaties or referendums (Art.311 TFEU). This would have to be unanimously agreed by the Prime Ministers and Presidents, but seeing how they can agree unanimously to push through Lisbon, they should have no problem in agreeing EU taxes in due time to finance all the extra functions which the post-Lisbon Union would exercise.

10. A RACE TO THE BOTTOM IN PAY: Lisbon would copperfasten the Laval, Rüffert and related judgements of the EU Court of Justice, which put the competition rules of the EU market above the right of trade unions to enforce pay standards higher than the minimum for migrant workers. At the same time Lisbon would give the EU full control of immigration policy (Art.79 TFEU).

11. FOREIGN INVESTMENT AND HARMONISING TAXES: Lisbon would amend the existing treaties to give the EU exclusive power as regards rules on foreign direct investment(Arts.206-7 TFEU). It would give the EU Court of Justice the power to order the harmonisation of national indirect taxes if it judges that these cause a “distortion of competition” (Art.113 TFEU, Protocol 27 on the Internal Market and Competition). These steps could threaten Ireland’s 12.5% company profits tax, which is the principal incentive that attracts foreign companies to Ireland and keeps them here when they come.

12. A NON-ELECTED EU PRESIDENT: The Treaty would enable the 27 EU Prime Ministers to appoint an EU President for up to five years without allowing voters any say as to who he or she would be, thereby abolishing the present six-month rotating EU presidencies (Art.15 TEU).

13. NEUTRALITY AND A MORE MILITARIZED EU: Lisbon would militarize the EU further by requiring Member States “progressively to improve their military capabilities” (Art.42.3 TEU) and to aid and assist other Member States experiencing armed attack “by all the means in their power” (Art.42.7 TEU).

______

*TEC= European Community Treaty; TEU = Treaty on European Union as amended by the Lisbon Treaty; TFEU = Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union as amended by the Lisbon Treaty. These two amended Treaties together would become the Constitution of the new post-Lisbon European Union.

_______

Issued by the National Platform EU Research and Information Centre, 24 Crawford Ave., Dublin 9; Tel.: 01-8305792; Director Anthony Coughlan. This document has been compiled with the aid of authorities on European and Irish constitutional law. See also the our web-site: nationalplatform.org
For more detailed information see euabc.eu This is a dictionary/lexicon on all matters to do with the EU and Lisbon, that is neutral as between the Yes and No sides. It has articles from both sides and seeks to give people the honest facts so that they can make up their own minds.

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⚠Irish Dáil should not have inferior powers to the German Parliament in controlling Irish Government Ministers when exercising the Lisbon Treaty’s self-amending powers

Posted on 2 July, 2009 by NationalPlatform.Org

The  Dáil and Seanad should insist on  parliamentary control over the Taoiseach and Government Ministers in exercising the self-amending powers of the Lisbon Treaty, just as the German Constitutional Court requires the German Parliament to do.

Ireland should not be content with a lesser standard of parliamentary control of  Government Ministers than Germany if the Lisbon Treaty should be ratified.

The Government should make provision for Oireachtas control of Lisbon’s self-amending powers  in legislation accompanying the Lisbon Treaty Referendum Bill.

Otherwise not only the people, but the Dail and Seanad,  would be agreeing to give extraordinary powers to Ministers if the Lisbon Treaty should come into force.

The Simplified Treaty Revision Procedure proposed by Lisbon (Art.48.7, amended Treaty on European Union) would permit the Prime Ministers and Presidents on the European Council to shift European Union decision-taking from unanimity to qualified majority voting in most of the Treaty on the Functioning of the Union (TFEU), as long as they agreed this unanimously amongst themselves.

This could apply, for example, to the Treaty article dealing with harmonising indirect taxes (Art.113 TFEU), where unanimity is currently required

Lisbon also has   several “bridge articles” or “ratchet-clauses“, which would allow the European Council to switch from unanimity to majority voting in certain specified areas, such as judicial cooperation in civil matters (Art.81.3 TFEU), in criminal matters (Art.83.1 TFEU), in relation to the EU Public Prosecutor (Art.86.4 TFEU) and the Multiannual financial framework (Art.312.2 TFEU).

While the Lisbon Treaty provides that National Parliaments have to be notified of shifts from unanimity to qualified majority voting in some, though not all,  of these cases,  National Parliaments are not required to give their formal agreement.  The Taoiseach and Government Ministers would be able therefore to exercise these powers without  proper parliamentary control.

Of concern also is the enlarged scope of the “Flexibility Clause” (Art.352 TFEU), whereby if  the Treaty does not provide the necessary powers to enable the Union attain its very wide objectives, the Council of Ministers may take appropriate measures by unanimity.

The Lisbon Treaty would extend this provision from the area of operation of the Common Market, where it operates at present,  to all of the new Union’s policies directed at attaining its much wider post-Lisbon objectives. The Flexibility Clause has been widely used to extend EU law-making over the years. The consent of National Parliaments  is not required for Government Ministers to use it.

As the judgement of the  German Constitutional Court states (par. 414):  “To the extent that the general bridging procedure pursuant to Article 48.7(3)TEU Lisbon and the special bridging clause pursuant to Article 81.3(3) TFEU grant the national parliaments a right to make known their opposition, this is not a  sufficient equivalent to the requirement of ratification. It is therefore necessary that the representative of the German Government  in the European Council or in the Council may only approve the draft Resolution if empowered to do so by the German Bundestag and Bundesrat within a period yet to be determined …”

And again: ” …the silence of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat  may not be construed as approval.” (par. 416)

As things stand, Ireland’s Dail and Seanad will be expected to remain silent while Irish Government Ministers exercise these extraordinary new powers at EU level  in a post-Lisbon EU – unless legislation comparable to what Germany’s Constitutional Court proposes makes their actions subject to parliamentary approval in advance, and subject indirectly to the approval of Ireland’s citizens.

On Tuesday the German Constitutional Court ruled that ratification of the Lisbon Treaty would only be constitutional for Germany if parliamentary control  – and indirectly citizens’ control – over German Government Ministers operating at EU level were instituted in these “self-amending: Treaty areas.

This should also be done in Ireland.

(Signed)

Anthony Coughlan
Director

 

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☘Lisbon Treaty News: German Constitutional Court delays Germany’s ratification of the Lisbon Treaty

Posted on 30 June, 2009 by NationalPlatform.Org

Below for your information is a news item received from  Open Europe, London,  on the German Constitutional Court’s  decision of this morning on the Lisbon Treaty.

Appended to this post is an ☛on-site link to the Constitutional Court’s  decision  in English.

It seems that the  Constitutional  Court is saying that Germany, at least , must ensure that their parliament – both houses – participates in major EU decisions.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung  says the Constitutional Court ruling is demanding a law to guarantee the rights of the German Parliament in the EU decision-making process.

If that is so, should not Oireachtas Eireann have a law requiring this too – and Westminster and Paris and Prague and Bucharest, and 22 others?

Should  not all EU National  Parliaments also have  “participation in European lawmaking procedures”?

The most important  operative paragraphs of the  Court’s  ruling seem to be  these ones:-

The Basic Law does not grant the German state bodies powers to transfer sovereign powers in such a way that their exercise can independently establish other competences for the European Union. It prohibits the transfer of competence to decide on its own competence  (Kompetenz-Kompetenz).

The principle of conferral is therefore not only a principle of European law (Article 5.1 of the Treaty on European Union; Article 5.1 sentence 1 and 5.12 of the Treaty on European Union  in its version of the Treaty of Lisbon ), but, just like the European Union’s obligation to respect the Member States’ national identity (Article 6.3 TEU; Article 4.2 sentence 1 TEU Lisbon), it takes up constitutional principles from the Member States. The integration programme of the European Union must therefore be sufficiently precise.

To the extent that the Member States elaborate the law laid down in the Treaties in such a way that, with the principle of conferral fundamentally continuing to apply, an amendment of the law laid down in the Treaties can be brought about without a ratification procedure, a special responsibility is incumbent on the legislative bodies, apart from the Federal Government, as regards participation, which, in Germany, must, on the national level, comply with the requirements under Article 23.1 of the Basic Law (responsibility for integration).

The act approving a treaty amending a European Treaty and the national accompanying laws must therefore be such that European integration continues to take place according to the principle of conferral without the possibility for the European Union of taking possession of Kompetenz-Kompetenz or to violate the Member States’ constitutional identity which is not amenable to integration, in this case, that of the Basic Law.

For borderline cases of what is still constitutionally admissible, the German legislature must, if necessary, make arrangements with its laws that accompany approval to ensure that the responsibility for integration of the legislative bodies can sufficiently develop.

(Signed)
- Anthony Coughlan
Director

German Constitutional Court suspends ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, demanding a change to German law giving parliament more say over EU decision-making

CREDIT: Open Europe

30 June 2009

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports that the German Constitutional Court has ruled that the Lisbon Treaty is compatible with the German Constitution, but has withheld approval for immediate ratification, demanding a law to guarantee the rights of the German Parliament in the EU decision-making process.

The press release of the Constitutional Court notes that the German ratification act should be modified because the German Lower House and Upper House “have not been accorded sufficient rights of participation in European lawmaking procedures and treaty amendment procedures.”

It continues: “the Federal Republic of Germany’s instrument of ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon may not be deposited as long as the constitutionally required legal elaboration of the parliamentary rights of participation has not entered into force.”

The press release notes that: “the further development of the competences of the European Parliament can reduce, but not completely fill, the gap between the extent of the decision-making power of the Union’s institutions and the citizens’ democratic power of action in the Member States.”

FT Deutschland notes that “the Judges have considered the EU to have a democratic deficit. Therefore sovereign rights such as decisions on budgetary matters or on penal law, cannot be transferred to the EU without the consent of the German Lower and Upper House”. The newspaper reports that this means the German Parliament will in future need to consent to any changes to the EU treaties, with Frankfurter Rundschau reporting that military operations, “which could be possible after Lisbon”, will have to be approved by the German Parliament.

Deutsche Welle quotes the Court saying: “If one wanted to summarise this result, one could say: the Constitutional Court says ‘yes’ to the Lisbon Treaty but demands that parliament’s right to participation be strengthened at the national level.”

Die Welt notes that the German law giving the Parliament more say could pass soon, with a first reading to be held on 26 August. The leader of the Christian Democrat faction leader in the German Parliament Norbert Röttgen has announced that the second and third reading are planned for 8 September. German elections are to be held on 27 September.

Open Europe has published a new poll, conducted by German polling company Psyma, which shows that 77 percent of German voters want a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

☛ German Constitutional Court Decision: Lisbon Treaty Ratification

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