An ‘innovative’ treaty” “

The “preliminary outline” of the constitutional treaty was reserved for the last moment. The text was only distributed to the members of the Convention on the future of Europe on the afternoon of 28 October, when the Convention’s president, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, described it to the plenary assembly in Brussels and opened the discussion. We gathered some off-the-cuff comments made to journalists by Giscard and others following the debate. Valery Giscard d’Estaing (president of the Convention on the future of Europe): “We must insist on the simplification of the texts and procedures. A priority objective must be the intelligibility of the future constitutional treaty” to all European citizens who have so far seen their Union governed by a daunting plethora of rules and regulations. “Of the 414 articles comprised by the European treaties currently in force some 205 can be maintained more or less unchanged; 136 will have to be slightly modified, and 73 require complete revision”. The Charter of fundamental rights of the European Union “will be an integral part of the new treaty, but the procedures to maintain the right balance between the various parts of the text will have to be established”. The members of the Convention are called to work with “imagination” and to “support the innovative proposals”, such as dual citizenship, national and European, the congress of peoples, and a no longer rotating but permanent president of the Council. “Our work will be judged not by the amendments we make to the existing treaties but by the solutions we invent” to solve the problems by which we are faced. Giscard discounted the idea of a “popular referendum” for the approval of the European constitutional treaty, because the process of ratification will depend, as usual, on the ratification procedures provided by the individual States. Giuliano Amato (vice-president of the Convention on the future of Europe): “The Convention is called to decide what are the objectives that the European Union is called to privilege, and what are its priorities. The draft treaty that has been presented is only a ‘skeleton’ that needs to be fleshed out: it’s a text not to be amended but completely rewritten”. As regards the participation of civil society and the churches in the life of the Union, the draft European constitution provides “an entire title – i.e. chapter – dedicated to the ‘democratic life of the Union’, with particular attention to participative democracy”. We need to aim at the “protection and promotion of cultural, social and religious diversities” and to favour “dialogue” between these expressions of civil society and the Community institutions. “A popular referendum for the approval of the treaty” cannot be excluded: the Convention could make provision for such a referendum as the condition for its entry into force. Inigo Mendez de Vigo (representative of the European Parliament on the Convention’s Presidium): “Our ambition is that of re-establishing the European Union on completely new juridical foundations. To achieve this objective, a clear constitutional framework needs to be fixed”. The new treaty “will be a single text that will substitute and abrogate all the previous treaties. The choice to simplify and clarify the constitutional framework is dictated by necessity”. In this way, the current system of “pillars”, on which the Union is currently founded, will disappear. In the draft now under discussion, membership of the Union is considered a “voluntary act of States for the achievement of the common objectives fixed by the treaty”. Thanks to the principle of “dual citizenship”, introduced for the first time by the draft treaty, it will be possible, moreover, “to have two titles of identity, one national and the other European”. This is an innovation aimed at reinforcing “European citizenship”. ¤