A NEW draft European Treaty, the Treaty of Lisbon, will be hammered out at a conference in Brussels hosted by the Portuguese Presidency of the European Union.
The draft document, which should be ready by October, aims to iron out some of the grievances voiced by Poland.
Last week, representatives of the 27 member states got together for the first session of Intergovernmental Conferences that will debate and redesign the Reformed Treaty between now and then.
Poland is the only country in the European Union that has, so far, insisted on clarification on several key points.
The President of the European Union’s rotating presidency, Luís Amado, insisted that the 27 EU member states “took action”, confirming that Lisbon would not “budge an inch” from the mandate that it has been handed from the European Commission, to create a new European Union Treaty to replace the dead-in-the-water EU Constitution.
Poland’s Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga said that her country intended, like the United Kingdom, to have the right of rejecting the judicial character of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Voting power
Poland’s Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kacznski and his brother, President Lech Kacznski, have been demanding extra voting power for Poland and a mechanism that would allow a minority of dissenting states to be able to delay EU decisions for up to two years.
In Britain, the Conservative Party claims that the new draft treaty would fundamentally change Britain’s place in the EU and are calling for a referendum with Shadow Secretary, William Hague, saying that the treaty is “simply the European Union Constitution with different packaging”.
The President of the European Commission, Durão Barroso, praised the work of the Portuguese Presidency of the European Union in launching formal negotiations for the future treaty and said that he expected “loyal and active support”.
Judicial experts from the member states also met in Brussels to analyse the document.
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