EU leaders in Treaty signing dash

Europe’s leaders will stamp their carbon footprint all over Europe’s new reform treaty this week.

They are due to fly nearly 50,000 miles between them on Thursday for a one-hour treaty signing ceremony in Lisbon – and then all meet again in Brussels on Friday for a long-scheduled summit.

Efforts to organise the signing ceremony and the summit in one place have failed in a clash of political egos – leaving the EU’s claims to be leading the way in tackling climate change open to attack from environmental campaigners.

The Portuguese government, holding the EU Presidency, insists the signing ceremony must be in Lisbon, to ensure that the document is known as the “Lisbon Treaty”.

But the fact that the date clashes with a routine EU summit in Brussels did not amuse the Belgian government, which refused a Portuguese request to move the summit meeting to Lisbon.

The result will be a dash by more than two dozen government aircraft from national capitals to Lisbon and back in a morning – and then another round of flights to Brussels the next day for the summit.

Number crunchers put the extra environmental impact of the Lisbon leg at about 135 tonnes of CO2.

Portuguese officials say it is the Brussels journey which is surplus to requirements, because the summit could have been staged alongside the treaty signing ceremony.

But Belgian officials counter that routine EU summits have to be in Brussels under the rules of the existing EU treaty, and it is the Portuguese who are wasting time, money and risking the environment.

The EU history book shows that, after previous treaties have been agreed, the Union’s leaders have always returned to the scene of the deal a few months later for the formal signing ceremony – the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the Amsterdam treaty in 1997 and the 2001 Nice Treaty.

“It is tradition to go back to the scene of the crime for the signing” said one EU official, reluctant to be identified. “Most of us think that, if anything, it is the Belgians who are being difficult, rather than the Portuguese.”

Originally the signing in Lisbon was on the morning of a summit due to start at tea-time on Thursday in Brussels.

And the only concession from Belgium is to delay the summit start until Friday morning, turning it into a one day meeting and putting some political as well as geographical distance between the two competing events.