One of the main reasons people should vote No to Amsterdam is that the treaty gives the EU power to decide our fundamental rights.
There is no money in fundamental rights. So handing the power to Brussels to decide them does not raise the fuss which the 15 men - not a single woman - who signed the Amsterdam Treaty made over other areas of the treaty. But the protection of human rights is at the core of the relation between citizen and State.
It is not just that EU members must abide by normal human rights standards, for their constitutions already enshrine fundamental rights, and they all subscribe to the European Human Rights Convention. What Amsterdam does is to enable the Council of Ministers to create and declare new human rights, and then the Court of Justice - that "court with a mission", to use the self-description of one of its judges - interprets and applies them. Amsterdam makes all national content of human rights disappear into thin air, and shifts the ultimate-decision-making power to the EU level.
Article F1 permits a majority of EU states to deprive another member-state of all its rights under the treaties if they find it to be in "serious and persistent breach" of the general principles of "liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law" set out in Article F. Those rights a State may be deprived of include money, voting rights and the travel rights of its citizens.
If a member-state is deprived of its rights in this fashion, its treaty obligations nonetheless remain. A decision to deprive an EU state of its rights under this Article is taken by the other EU states. It is not taken by any court, and there is no appeal against it. So this is not the rule of law. It is rather a form of rule in which the other member-states are judges and accusers in their own case.
This is said to be to meet a Greek colonels type of situation. But EU states are frequently found to be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights in relation to something or other, breaches that sometimes go unrepaired for years, and there are no sanctions. No one imagines France or Germany being threatened with deprivation of their EU rights under Article F1 of Amsterdam. But it could be used as a form of pressure on smaller EU states, or be threatened against them, if the larger ones want them to do something they do not want to, possibly quite unrelated to the human rights field.
Amsterdam inserts a new Article 6A into the Rome Treaty empowering the Council of Ministers to "take appropriate action to combat discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation".
The Irish Times has a discriminating readership, who will know that some discriminations are good and some bad. For this one-sentence article gives a huge new legislative competence to Brussels.
Strictly construed - and this kind of provision has been strictly construed in America - authorising the EU to combat discrimination based inter alia on sex or sexual orientation in any sphere of life appears to be wide open to manipulation and to ideologically-driven campaigns by minority pressure groups. It could be interpreted as forbidding any privileging of male-female marriage over homosexual unions and open the way to child adoption by gay couples. People will have different views on the merits or demerits of such steps. But why should we hand the power to decide on them to the EU?
The same Article could be used to forbid any kind of compulsory retirement age as "ageist". Theoretically, it could be used to impose women priests and mullahs as requirements of European law, which overrides national law and constitutions in case of conflict.
Do voters really want to sign up to a sloganising article like this proposed Article 6A, permeated by post-modern "political correctness", without allowing the Irish people the time adequately to consider it, or to ponder the immense and lasting revision of our institutions that would be involved in implementing it?
Amsterdam's supposition that the EU member-states already share a common value system is a dangerous and disingenuous fiction. There is no consensus as to the source of human rights - such as the theory of natural law - which would permit a rational evaluation of conflicting positions. Ireland and Britain have habeas corpus and trial by jury. On the continent they have inquisitorial magistrates and possible detention without a court appearance. Article K6 of the Treaty opens the way to possible EU "harmonisation" here.
The requirements of natural justice, the rule of law, due legal process, trial by jury, marriage and family law, the right to life, the rights of the underprivileged and the treatment of refugees, the sale and use of drugs, environmental protection, neutrality and nuclear armaments are among the array of complex human rights issues on which EU memberstates have evolved quite distinct positions.
The only possible justification for the gradual imposition of a harmonised value system like this across the EU is that such harmonisation would further the objective of a federal Union state. However, this justification subordinates the protection of rights to the political objective. It does not, as it claims, enhance the protection of rights. It runs directly contrary to the principle of subsidiarity. It necessarily implies that it does not matter what protection is given to a particular right so long as it represents a common EU position.
Anthony Coughlan is senior lecturer in social policy at Trinity College, Dublin, and secretary of the National Platform organisation.