GERMANY’S HIGHEST court dismissed constitutional challenges to the Lisbon Treaty yesterday but called for ratification to be delayed until the rights of the German parliament in EU decision-making are strengthened.
Berlin now faces the challenge of getting the required law change through parliament before general elections in September – only then can president Horst Köhler sign the ratification Bill into law.
“The German constitution permits transfer of sovereign powers to an interstate body like the EU, but does not permit entry to a European federal state,” said constitutional court vice-president Andreas Vosskuhle. “The treaty of Lisbon changes nothing in that the Bundestag remains the representative organ of the German people.”
Foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier welcomed the verdict that the treaty was compatible with Germany’s constitution.
“The court has given us some homework to take with us, and we have to take it seriously,” he said.
“I’m confident we can make sure that ratification will take place this year.”
In a unanimous verdict, the eight-judge panel dismissed complaints from six parties that the Lisbon Treaty would dilute German parliamentary power and curtail constitutional rights in favour of a state-like EU entity.
In a 147-page ruling, they tackled the complaints at their common root: the claim of a democratic deficit at the heart of the European Union.
The flaw in this claim, the judges said, was trying to measure the legitimacy of a supranational organisation using the democratic yardstick of a sovereign state.
The EU conforms with broad democratic principles, the court said, precisely because it does not slavishly copy state-level democratic structures, operating instead as a “union of sovereign democratic states”.
Not even the European Parliament, equipped with new powers in Lisbon, can overcome a “insoluble democratic deficit” inherent in the interplay between the national and supranational.
With no immediate solution to hand, the court proposed two controls: greater oversight for Germany’s two houses of parliament, the Bundestag and the Bundesrat; and the court itself will keep up its “watch that the community or union’s authority do not . . . transgress competences conferred on it”.
The court’s condition for ratification puts Berlin under the gun: at a push, the government can formulate a law and have it through both houses of parliament by September 18th, nine days before the general election. Fresh court challenges in Karlsruhe could delay ratification into the next parliament, after the Irish referendum.
Speculation was rife in Karlsruhe yesterday about whether the ruling would send a signal around the union for greater co-determination by parliaments.
“Previous EU rulings had tough language and a mild effect, this ruling uses mild language but may have a tough long-term effect,” said Jan Techau, director of Berlin’s Alfred von Oppenheim Centre for European Policy Studies.
German MPs and representatives of Germany’s federal states in court yesterday said they would welcome greater participation rights. “But I can’t see parliament being able to put the government in a policy straitjacket at EU summits, like the Danes,” said one state official.
Elsewhere in the verdict were precise readings of treaty issues of concern to Irish voters. “The wording . . . does not oblige member states to provide national armed forces for European Union military deployments,” said the judges.
They added that member states would retain control of crucial competences from criminal law to tax law.