We are rapidly headed for a constitutional crisis in the European Union which has been triggered by the Irish No to the Nice Treaty.
The EU Council of Ministers is at the centre of this crisis, not the Commission as some would believe, because the Council is the body with the power and control. It is becoming a ruthless and unaccountable body.
There is a strong correlation between how EU treaties are agreed and how the Council of Ministers operates. Both are unacceptable. The reluctance to make rational changes that would make the Council of Ministers more accountable is dangerous.
Within the EU institutions the Council is the spider in the web. There are more and more areas where it believes it should not be controlled because what it is doing is "confidential". In March of this year it adopted security regulations as "internal rules", which were also enforceable on the member-states.
The security regulations have been justified as necessary to comply with structures of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Neither the European Parliament nor national parliaments were consulted or informed.
The Council is seeking to corrupt, through these security regulations, even the limited democratic control citizens have through access to information. The security regulations are not limited to common foreign or security policy but can also be used in relation to justice and home affairs and asylum and immigration. The fact that regulations in these area could be imposed by decree without discussion in the parliaments of the member-states or the European Parliament shows what kind of crisis we are headed for when this becomes more widely known.
The basic problem with the Council is that it is a legislative and executive body in one. Normally in a democracy, the legislature makes the laws and the executive implements them. The executive body is accountable to the legislature as to how it operates. As a legislature, the Council is made up of executives. This is not the European democratic tradition.
As a legislature the Council should sit in public, as the European Parliament does, and have its debates and decisions recorded.
INSTEAD it sits in secret conclave like a College of Cardinals or, like legislatures in the People's Republic of China and North Korea, behaves as if it is accountable to no one.
Federalists have proposed the solution to is to make the Council a second chamber sitting in public. Council would become not an executive but a second chamber representing the member-states.
This is unacceptable to millions of people across the EU who demand accountability through their own parliaments. This the national parliaments have singularly failed to deliver.
To have accountability, people need to know what is happening. This requires openness and access to both documents and records of decisions, particularly by the member-state governments in Council. The Council's unreasonable secrecy makes this impossible.
The Council has recently made an attempt at openness. In April 2001 a number of documents related to legislation became available through the Internet. But again it gave member-state governments a right to veto public access. This leaves the member-state able to say one thing in Council and another at home.
This was recently compounded by an attempt to have all EU documents relating to NATO classified, even documents referring to NATO documents. The European Parliament has taken a case to the European Court against the Council's July 2000 decision to extend secrecy to crisis management, both civil and military, and to exclude public access to such documents.
The Council had established a new, top-secret classification for documents in the field of security and defence. This move was dubbed "Solana's Coup", after the Council's High Representative in Foreign and Security Policy, former NATO chief Javier Solana.
Member-state parliaments have attempted to call the Council to account but have largely failed because it appears to be impossible for one member-state parliament to call the whole Council to account.
Member-state parliamentary committees on Europe are obliged to keep confidentiality beyond what is the normal in the member-states where legislative bodies sit in public. The Council, made up of the governments of all member-states, refuses to be answerable to any one of them.
The Dail has in practice been informed by Ministers after a decision has been taken. Accountability is therefore lost and this is compounded by the secrecy in which the Council operates.
EU citizens need to ask how decisions are being made in their name. Ministers and heads of government have regular bi-monthly and six-monthly meetings at which legislation is discussed and agreed. Why is this process so secretive? Why can the agendas not be published and national positions recorded?
People in Ireland, Denmark or Sweden, for example, are entitled to know if assurances ministers gave to their national parliaments have been adhered to.
Nuala Ahern is a Green Party Member of the European Parliament for the Leinster constituency