MEPs defend Constitution draft
By Dace Akule
We must defend the Constitution draft so that governments do not erase what the Convention has achieved, said the majority of the MEPs speaking in the extraordinary debate on the Constitution blueprint in the European Parliament on Wednesday, 18 June.
Parliamentarians asked the president of the European Parliament, Pat Cox, to take this strong message to the EU summit in Thessaloniki beginning today.
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"Governments should not hammer what the parliamentarians have achieved because they don't have the legitimacy to do so," said Elmar Brok, German Christian Democrat and the leader of the biggest political group in the parliament, the PPE-DE. The group would like to see no digging into the Constitution draft, he added.
Andrew Duff, the British liberal democrat MEP, echoed this view, saying the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), should stick to "the essentials" that have been established in the Constitution draft and not re-open the discussions: "What could not be agreed between 15 countries in Nice will not be agreed by 25 in the future IGC".
The Constitution blueprint that was almost finalised on 13 June will be put on the table for the EU governments in the Intergovernmental Conference this autumn. The 10 accession states planning to enter the EU in May 2004 have been promised equal rights in that decision-making process.
Mr Cox also expressed his hope that EU leaders meeting today in Thessaloniki will give the Convention the mandate that it asked for in order to be able to finish the debates on the policies of the EU. The Convention is ready to reconvene for one last plenary session at the beginning of July.
Nothing is perfect
The Constitution draft has received a lot of praise from the majority of parliamentarians. The document was called a "radical improvement of the existing treaties", a "milestone in the evolution of Europe" and a "clear picture of who does what in the EU".
Íñigo Méndez de Vigo, Spanish MEP, was particularly pleased that the Constitution draft includes the so-called popular initiative, citizens' right to file a petition to the European Commission that could then introduce a new norm or law. This would be a "big step towards the creation of a European-wide civil society".
However, many agreed that the document is not perfect. "The baby is not as pretty as we hoped," Graham Watson, British MEP and leader of the liberal ELDR group, said in the plenary. We would like to go further in order to enable the EU to act more decisively abroad, he added.
Other negative comments by parliamentarians revolved around the exclusion of a reference to Christianity, the creation of a foreign minister, the reference to nuclear energy and the lack of transparency.
"We have not solved people's problems. On the contrary - we risk increasing their frustrations about the EU," José Ribeiro e Castro, Portuguese MEP, said. He was one of the parliamentarians to repeat earlier calls for a European-wide referendum on the Constitution draft.
The European Parliament was the first EU institution to debate the Constitution blueprint.