The Treaty of Lisbon Treaty of Lisbon amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community Type of treaty Amender of previous treaties Signed 13 December 2007 Location Lisbon , Portugal Sealed 18 December 2007 Effective 1 December 2009 Signatories EU Member States Depositary Government of Italy Languages 23 EU languages The long process of ratification This investigation provides a short introduction to the long process of ratification and all the obstacles that the Union had to face before the Lisbon Treaty, signed on 13 December 2007, rejected by Ireland in 2008 1 and finally approved on 2 October 2009, could finally come into force; 1 In Italy the Senate had already approved the Lisbon Treaty on 24 July 2008 (288 votes in favour) and on 31 July 2008 the Chamber of Deputies unanimously approved its ratification. In the UK the parliamentary ratification was held on 11 March in the House of Commons: 346 votes in favour, 206 against, and on 18 June 2008 in the House of Lords (by an undetailed oral vote). 1 it provides also a reference to the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (2004), hereafter called the EU Constitution for the sake of convenience, rejected by France and the Netherlands in 2005 2. The two new figures that the Treaty creates are here introduced. The Treaties usually take their name after the city where they were signed: a few years usually elapse between this date and the date of ratification (if any). Under current law, unanimity is required for these documents to be ratified, therefore the process is usually long. For the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, for example, the process proved to be extremely arduous: it entered into force on 1 December 2009 but it was signed on 13 December 2007 in Lisbon (as Portugal held the EU Council’s Presidency at the time), and was planned to have been ratified in all member States by the end of 2008, so that it could come into force before the 2009 European elections. 26 member States voted “Yes”, albeit in different periods 3, but for several reasons 4 the Irish electorate on 12 June 2008 voted against it (the proposal was defeated by 53.4% of votes to 46.6%, with a turnout of 53.1%). Abstention was high, and it is usually divided into two categories: voluntary and circumstantial. Voluntary abstention is the main reason for not voting: the main element of this was a lack of knowledge or understanding of the Treaty. Some people, when asked why they did not go to the polls, replied “Even if you want to inform yourself and try and get educated on it, you’d still need a dictionary to try and explain some of the words in it”. Admittedly, the language of the Lisbon Treaty, just like any other European document, is unreadable for the average person and appears to be written more for a handful of civil servants rather than Europe’s 500 million citizens (Hari 2005). One criticism frequently made of the EU Constitution, for example, was that it is “unreadable”, with disparaging remarks across the political spectrum: “A Constitution should be readable and accessible to the population. It should not be a document of 480 pages, with some 400 more pages of appendixes and declarations. That’s really crazy” (Argentieri 2005). The EU Constitution was supposed to simplify and synthesize previous treaties within a single, ‘clear’, foundational document for the EU. President Delors urged Commission staff “to write with a lighter pen” and President Santer’s dictum was that we should do “less but better”. In an interview from The Economist in 2002, Jack Straw, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, declared: “The Constitution of the world's most complex international organization — the United Nations — fits easily into my jacket pocket. The Constitution of one of the world's oldest and most successful democracies — the United States — would fit neatly into the other pocket. I do not have a pocket big enough for what passes as the Constitution — “the consolidated Treaties” — of the European Union. Size is important. The smaller the better when it comes to Constitutions. The best bits in both Constitutions are their Preambles, in ringing declaratory prose. The UN’s covers a small page; the 2 When the Constitution was rejected in the French and Dutch referenda (respectively on 29 May and 1 June), 18 member states had already ratified the Treaty, either by parliamentary procedures or by referendum. The Italian Chamber of Deputies (436 Yes, 28 No, 5 abstentions) and the Italian Senate (217 Yes, 16 No) had already approved it, on 25 January and on 6 April 2005. In the United Kingdom plans to organize a referendum were suspended, and ratification in Ireland, which would have also been subject to a referendum, was postponed. Bulgaria and Romania, which entered the EU in January 2007, already ratified the Constitution before accession. 3 Dates of ratification: Austria: 13 May 2008, Belgium: 15 October 2008, Bulgaria: 28 April 2008, Cyprus: 26 August 2008, Denmark: 29 May 2008 , Estonia: 23 September 2008, Finland: 30 September 2008, France: 14 February 2008, Greece: 12 August 2008, Hungary: 6 February 2008, Italy: 8 August 2008, Latvia: 16 June 2008, Lithuania: 26 August 2008, Luxembourg:, 21 July 2008, Malta: 6 February 2008, Netherlands: 11 September 2008, Portugal: 17 June 2008, Romania: 11 March 2008, Slovakia: 24 June 2008, Slovenia: 24 April 2008, Spain: 8 October 2008, Sweden: 10, December 2008, United Kingdom: 16 July 2008. 4 A week later Eurobarometer conducted hours after the Irish vote was released, indicating why the electorate voted as they did. Those respondents who voted "no" in the referendum were asked to give the reasons why they voted "no" to the treaty, most said that they did not know enough about the Treaty and would not want to vote for something they were not familiar with, and that their negative vote aimed at protecting Irish identity. 2 US Constitution’s Preamble covers just four lines. With the European Constitution Mr. Giscard D’Estaing’s original plan was to come up with something as inspiring and memorable as the Preamble of the American Constitution. Yet, its Preamble counted 244 words, and the whole text counted 66,647 words. The Lisbon Treaty is indeed even longer, in that if we consider both the first and second part, the protocols, the annexes and the declarations the total words amount to 123,000 words, almost twice the size of the failed Constitution. The two treaties alone count approximately 65,000 words, leaving out the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which in the Treaty of Lisbon is made legally binding. Indeed, Article 6 of the Treaty on European Union (the first part of the Lisbon Treaty) reads as follows: Article 6 (ex Article 6 TEU) 1. The Union recognises the rights, freedoms and principles set out in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union of 7 December 2000, as adapted at Strasbourg, on 12 December 2007, which shall have the same legal value as the Treaties. The provisions of the Charter shall not extend in any way the competences of the Union as defined in the Treaties. The rights, freedoms and principles in the Charter shall be interpreted in accordance with the general provisions in Title VII of the Charter governing its interpretation and application and with due regard to the explanations referred to in the Charter, that set out the sources of those provisions. 2. The Union shall accede to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Such accession shall not affect the Union's competences as defined in the Treaties. 3. Fundamental rights, as guaranteed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and as they result from the constitutional traditions common to the Member States, shall constitute general principles of the Union's law. The three texts, TEC, TFEU and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, have equal legal value and combined constitute the European Union’s legal basis. The Irish are the only people in the EU who were offered a referendum on Lisbon, in addition to a parliamentary vote, in that the Irish Constitution requires a vote on any treaty that transfers any power at all to the European level. There were unsuccessful calls to governments to hold referendums in some other member States, and it is generally assumed that referendums would have been lost in many other countries had their people been given a say. Ratification of the Treaty in all other member States was decided upon by the states’ national parliaments. The UK had already ratified the Treaty on 16 June 2008, but it cannot be denied the knock-on effect that the Irish referendum had on the anti-EU sentiment in the UK, which was further strengthened by the negative result of the Irish electorate. The Conservative Party would have liked to sabotage the treaty, but they wisely dropped the promise of a referendum, because the leader of the party, David Cameron, had great ambitions and was wise enough to avoid a row that could have wrecked his government. In fact, in the general elections held in May 2010, the Labour Party lost the elections, and after ten years of Tony Blair and five years of Gordon Brown, the Tories have now won the elections. The great change is the new coalition between the Conservative David Cameron and the Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg: as Conservative prime minister and Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister, they now run the first coalition government that Britain has seen since 1945.