Don’t be scared — there are no time bombs in the Lisbon treaty
The famous protocol inserted some years ago to ensure Europe could never over-ride our constitution on the so-called right-to-life issue is still there
SO FAR, I’ve heard two main arguments advanced by opponents of the Lisbon treaty. First of all, they say, it’s impossible to understand, so we should vote against it. Second, because the treaty adopts the charter of fundamental rights as EU law, it undermines our sovereignty and makes it impossible to make our own laws about some important things.
Well, I finally decided this weekend that I should download the treaty and see if I could make head or tail of it.
I’ve already read our own Referendum Commission’s website and found I had no difficulty whatever in understanding their description of what’s in the treaty. When you read that, the treaty seems pretty harmless.
Sure, there’ll be some changes in Ireland’s representation and in the voting arrangements by which decisions are made. But in all the fundamental stuff, Ireland’s interests seem to be totally protected.
But, I wondered, what if the conspiracy theorists are right? What if, somewhere in the body of the larger text, there are time bombs hidden away that would create a federal Europe, allow our young people to be conscripted into a unisex European army, enable euthanasia to be introduced to deal with the growing pension problem and force us all to have immigrant families living in our guest bedrooms?
If all these things are there in the treaty, the only way I could find them, I reckoned, was to download the lot and start ploughing my way through it.
To give the opposition its due, I decided that I would try to get the treaty from them. After all, they’ll be sure to have highlighted all the scary stuff.
So I went to the Libertas website. Libertas is a privately-funded organisation set up to have regard to “Europe’s traditional values of liberty, truth, justice, peace, democracy, tolerance, reason, innovation, family, dignity and the rule of law”, on the one hand, and to campaign against the Lisbon Treaty on the other. They’ve made a fierce amount of noise and I was fairly sure I’d get the real lowdown on what’s wrong with the Lisbon treaty there.
To my surprise, they don’t have the Lisbon treaty on their website. Instead, they refer you to the Institute of European Affairs, a body which supports all the same traditional European values and is totally committed to the Lisbon treaty.
According to Libertas, “the Institute of European Affairs has published a consolidated version of the existing EU treaties and how they are amended by the Lisbon Treaty so that citizens can see for themselves its effect on them”. So I got hold of the consolidated treaty from the organisation that supports it most strongly. But I was advised to go there by the organisation that opposes it most strongly! And when you start ploughing through it, there’s some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is that there’s a fierce amount of complicated stuff there. I haven’t finished it all because the long version has just under 450 pages — they include the treaty itself, no less than 37 protocols (dealing with items of concern to particular countries), two annexes, and 65 declarations. But if you concentrate on the treaty proper, the good news is that it’s not all that complicated.
Before I sat down to read it, I searched for a few of the things I reckon we need to be most scared of, or at least that we’re told we need to be most scared of. That’s the great thing about having a document on your computer — the ability to get the computer to do the searching for you.
And guess what? Here are some of the words that don’t appear at all in the entire treaty, from start to finish: euthanasia, family planning, abortion, contraception or divorce. The famous protocol inserted some years ago to ensure Europe could never over-ride our constitution on the so-called right-to-life issue is still there — it’s Protocol 35, if you’re interested.
But apart from what’s not in the document, what’s interesting is that a lot of what is in it is perfectly readable, even to unfortunate lay people like us. Right from the very beginning, there’s loads of material that I have to say I not only understood, but it made perfect sense.
For example, Article 2 sets out the principles on which the European Union is founded — “the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities”.
These values, it says, “are common to the member states in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail”.
I can’t imagine why people opposed to the Lisbontreaty describe that sort of language as hard to understand. And in the very next article, among other things, the EU is pledged to “combat social exclusion and discrimination and shall promote social justice and protection, equality between women and men, solidarity between generations and protection of the rights of the child”. Now of course, we don’t go as far as that in our own constitution, especially where the rights of children are concerned, although we’re thinking about it at the moment. And I know I’m simplifying matters where the simplicity of the treaty is concerned. The truth is that the further in you get, the more complicated (and a bit boring) it becomes.
But those people who are going around the place telling us we definitely can’t understand it, and should therefore vote against it, are insulting our intelligence. I’d suggest you give it a go — most of it is readable enough, and unless you believe in conspiracy theories, the legal mumbo-jumbo bits don’t have any time bombs in them.
AND incidentally, the easiest bit of all to read is the charter of fundamental rights, which the treaty proposes under Article 6 to make a part of European law.
Article 1 of the charter simply says this: “Human dignity is inviolable. It must be respected and protected.”
Nothing too complicated there — and what on earth could be wrong with having a sentiment like that as part of our law? Or these?
Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
Everyone has the right to education and to have access to vocational and continuing training.
Everyone has the right to own, use, dispose of and bequeath his or her lawfully acquired possessions.
Everyone is equal before the law.
Children shall have the right to such protection and care as is necessary for their wellbeing. In all actions relating to children … the child’s best interests must be a primary consideration.
There are 54 articles altogether in the charter — and not one of them is difficult to understand. I have to say I find it astonishing there are people willing to argue that we would in some sense be worse off if we had to abide by principles like these.
For my money, the sooner they’re inserted into our law, the better.
