Madam, - It is hard to do justice to the details of a complex treaty in a letter to the press, but Alan Dukes (July 3rd) is unfair in accusing me of half-truths and exaggeration in his reply to my letter on his suggested reading-list for Gay Byrne (July 1st).
According to the Lisbon Treaty (Art. 34 TEU), when the post-Lisbon Union "has defined a position on a subject which is on the United Nations Security Council agenda, those Member States which sit on the Security Council shall request that the High Representative be invited to present the Union's position". The "High Representative" - called the foreign minister under the earlier EU Constitution - would indeed be a separate voice at the UN from that of any individual EU state, although his or her message would be collectively agreed. The reason is that the post-Lisbon EU, in contrast to the EU of today, would have legal personality separate from its member-states and it would sign international treaties and be represented internationally by embassies and a diplomatic corps separate from those of its member-states - all of which are normal characteristics of a state.
Alan Dukes does not answer the question I put to him in my earlier letter: Can one be a citizen of anything other than a state? Lisbon makes citizenship of the constitutionally new Union which the treaty would establish "additional to" national citizenship rather than "complementary" to it as at present.
The rights of citizens of the post-Lisbon EU are set out in the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Implementing EU law by the member-states of the post-Lisbon Union would include implementing people's rights as EU citizens, side by side with implementing their rights as Irish or other national citizens. EU citizens, all 500 million of them, once they became aware of their rights under the charter, would expect no less. And it would be for the EU Court of Justice to define what EU citizens' rights are uniformly across the EU.
Thus the Lisbon Treaty would give the Court of Justice jurisdiction to define such rights as the right to life, the right to marry, the right to strike, the right to own property, the right to public health, the rights of the child, etc; and if the court's definition of the rights of EU citizens clashed with national rights definitions, the latter would have to give way because EU law would have primacy.
Whatever one's views of particular fundamental rights matters, it is surely unwise to give such an extensive human rights jurisdiction to the EU Court of Justice, a court notorious for "competency creep". One of its own judges once described it as a "court with a mission", that mission being to extend the scope of EU law to the utmost through its judgements.
Mr Dukes asks where my claim comes from that the EU makes some two-thirds of our laws each year. Last year Dr Roman Herzog, former president of Germany and former president of that country's constitutional court, wrote an article in Welt am Sonntag(January 14th, 2007), from which the following is an excerpt: "The German Ministry of Justice has compared the legal acts adopted by the Federal Republic of Germany between 1998 and 2004 with those adopted by the European Union in the same period. Results: 84 per cent come from Brussels, with only 16 per cent coming originally from Berlin. . .The figures. . .make it quite clear. By far the large majority of legislation valid in Germany is adopted by the German government in the Council of Ministers, and not by the German parliament. . .And so the question arises whether Germany can still be referred to unconditionally as a parliamentary democracy at all, because the separation of powers as a fundamental constituting principle of the constitutional order in Germany has been cancelled out for large sections of the legislation applying to this country."
Of course most EU laws will be regulations and statutory instruments rather than primary legislation. Also, the proportion of EU laws to national laws will vary from country to country and from time to time. But surely Dr Herzog's question can equally be asked of Ireland or indeed any other EU state. Can we any longer be referred to as parliamentary democracies at all in face of the flood of EU legislation, a flood that would greatly increase if the Lisbon Treaty should be ratified? - Yours, etc,
ANTHONY COUGHLAN,
Crawford Avenue,
Dublin 9.