Treaty not yet safe as British election looms

[Smokie]

Treaty not yet safe as British election looms
04 October 2009

Irish voters may well have gone to the polls last Friday with the impression that their vote would make or break the Lisbon Treaty. The electorate certainly had the power to break the Treaty.

A No vote would have finished the Lisbon Treaty and wrecked the EU reform process. Taoiseach Brian Cowen was in no way bluffing last week when he said that there could be no Lisbon III referendum.

But Irish voters have not yet guaranteed the Lisbon Treatys survival. The reason for this lies in the fact that the Lisbon Treaty needs to be ratified by all 27 member states. Two recalcitrants remain Poland and the Czech Republic. Their parliaments have already approved Lisbon but their Eurosceptic presidents have not.

Polands Lech Kaczynski seems the less problematic of the two. Although he has withheld his signature to date, he indicated last July that, in the event of an Irish Yes vote, he would not block the treaty.

His Czech counterpart Vaclav Klaus, a die-hard Eurosceptic, is a very different matter.

If he was on his own, Klaus would have little motivation to hold out. The problem is he has two allies (.1) time, and (.2) David Camerons Conservative Party in Britain.

The Conservatives 14 points ahead in recent opinion polls are a racing certainty to be in power in Britain by mid-2010. It will be the first time ever that a Eurosceptic leading a Eurosceptic party will control a British government. So implacably anti-EU are the Conservatives that it is difficult to imagine them ratifying any conceivable reform Treaty.

Thus all Klaus has to do to kill the Lisbon Treaty and the EU reform process is to delay: to avoid completing Czech ratification (thereby preventing Lisbon coming into force) until the British Conservatives come to power. The Conservatives will then finish the job by holding an unwinnable referendum on it, during which they will advocate a No vote to an electorate already highly antagonistic to the EU.

Regrettably, this is no mere conspiracy theory. Last July, in a public display of support for Klaus and in an implicit act of encouragement to take exactly the approach outlined here Cameron sent a letter to Klaus confirming that once elected the Conservatives would withdraw Britains ratification of the treaty and hold a referendum. Klaus Civic Democrat (ODS) party now sits in the same antiFederalist grouping as the Conservatives in the European Parliament.

The fate of Lisbon will now hinge on whether (notwithstanding the approval given to the Lisbon Treaty by the Czech Senate last May and its Chamber of Deputies last February) Klaus can delay ratification until a British election is held possibly as late as next June.

A clearly concerned French President Nicolas Sarkozy has reportedly pressed for an emergency EU summit to apply international pressure on Klaus to approve the Treaty rapidly. More effective than such external pressure would probably be the domestic threat of impeachment should Klaus decline to sign ie, the possible removal of Klaus functions by vote of both Houses of the Czech parliament on the grounds of failure to perform his duties as president.

Any danger of such impeachment would vanish, however, if Klaus could lay the blame for his delay elsewhere. This is exactly the reason why last Tuesday, in a much-heralded move, a group of ODS senators allied to Klaus filed a petition to the Czech Constitutional Court attacking the treaty and associated Czech laws.

The Constitutional Court already pronounced in favour of the Treaty last November. It might seem puzzling that a second case can be brought now. (The German Constitutional Court threw out a similar attempt to re-litigate the Lisbon Treaty there last Wednesday week.) But the earlier Czech case related only to parts of the treaty.

Thus, legally, there is scope for a fresh challenge. The courts approach last November makes it unlikely that the new challenge will succeed.

Indeed the Courts President has stated that the most contentious Lisbon Treaty provisions have already been challenged.

But that scarcely matters. The ODS senators are not seeking victory in this case – merely an excuse for delaying ratification. It took seven months for the Constitutional Court to reach last Novembers verdict. If it takes as long to reach a decision this time, the British Conservatives may well be in power by the time the ruling is delivered.

If that happens, Klaus will have ...

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Here's hoping ... :huh: