Status Report on Lisbon Treaty Ratification

Our move has unfortunately broken the flux of my blog posts. Yet, as I am now well settled in New Haven, you will hopefully hear from me more often ;-) Many interesting things have happened on the international plane since I last posted on this blog and it is impossible to catch up with everything. I would therefore like to focus on recent developments in one of the major areas covered on this blog last year - the EU Reform Treaty, now officially called Lisbon Treaty.

The Lisbon Treaty was signed by the European heads of state in December 2007. The signing ceremony had been clouded by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown arriving after the whole ceremony was over. Eventually, however, the Lisbon Treaty was signed by all heads of state and thus entered its ratification stage - the last step before entering into force. Yet, it is the ratification process that is the most volatile. Previous reform efforts had failed when referenda in France and the Netherlands had rejected ratification of the EU Constitutional Treaty.

The ratification of the current Lisbon Treaty was then already up for a rough start as the current text had been drafted in a way to avoid referenda whenever possible. To date, only Ireland will have to cast a popular vote on the Lisbon Treaty. Yet in at least two countries, France and the UK, governments face opposition to their decisions to have the Lisbon Treaty ratified by parliament and not by referendum.

In France, the government has been exceedingly eager to avoid a repetition of the 2005 reversal. On Monday, the French Senate and National Assembly both passed an amendment to the French Constitution. The amendment cleared the way for a parliamentary ratification of the Lisbon Treaty (instead of a referendum). Besides eliminating any reference in the French Constitution to the failed Constitutional Treaty, the amendment also adds two articles concerning the interrelationship between the French legislature and the European Union. For the text of the constitutional amendments, visit the blog of former French President, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing [in French]. The French Senate and National Assembly are scheduled to vote on the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty at the end of this week.

It is worth noting that while the above-described amendments to the French Constitution were necessary to allow for a parliamentary vote on the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, the French Constitution has at all times provided for a parliamentary vote on the ratification of international treaties. According to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the parliamentary vote is even the primary path for ratification, a referendum being just an alternative option [pdf, in French]. The issue is that the previous government had deemed the Constitutional Treaty to be so important to warrant a popular vote by the French People. It seems that the current government has made a reassessment concerning the Lisbon Treaty and decided to resort to the parliamentary ratification procedure. This reassessment is not approved by some members of parliament as well as 59% of the French voters. EUobserver has more.

In the UK, the government's decision not to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty has encountered even more severe resistance. Several efforts are being made to stop a parliamentary vote on the ratification. The major argument of ratification opponents is that the government had previously promised to hold a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty before the treaty failed due to negative referenda in France and the Netherlands. A donor of the British conservative party therefore tries to get judicial review of the British Prime Minister's decision not to hold a referendum claiming a possible breach of contract. A similar case has been filed in a different court by a member of the UK Independence Party. BBC has more. Meanwhile, the so-called "I Want a Referendum (IWR)" campaign [website] intends to run "mock" referenda on the Lisbon Treaty in several constituencies across the UK. It remains to be seen how the situation develops.

I would like to conclude this post with some positive news: According to the BBC, Romania, Hungary, Malta, and Slovenia have already ratified the Lisbon Treaty. In Germany, the government has introduced a law to ratify the Lisbon Treaty. The German parliament is expected to vote on that law in the months to come. For more information regarding the German ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, click here [website of the German government, in German].