THE LISBON Treaty will do nothing to change the nature of the EU, according to the Professor of European Law at the University of Cambridge, Alan Dashwood.
He characterised the EU as “a federation of sovereign states.”
Speaking at a conference on the law of the Lisbon Treaty organised by the Irish Centre for European Law in Dublin yesterday he described the treaty as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing’’.
Expanding on his description of the EU, he said: “The entities that compose the union are sovereign states (as distinct from the states of the USA or the German Lander). Nobody questions their standing as full subjects of the international order, while they remain the principal focus of their citizens’ collective loyalty and the principal forum of democratic political activity.”
He said the nature of the union would be brought out even more clearly by the novel elements in the treaty.
By saying that the member states “confer competences”, it asserts the primacy of member states, a new statement preserving member states’ “national identities” and requiring the union to “respect their essential state functions” is more muscular than that in the earlier treaty. There is an express right of withdrawal from the union, indicating that sovereignty pooled in the union is fully recoverable.
Dr Gavin Barrett of UCD said two new treaty provisions dealing with the European Council and the European Central Bank were simply catching up with reality, as both have been functioning all along. Now the European Council would be subjected to legal control, he said.
Referring to the proposal in the treaty to elect a president of the council, he said: “This is not a president of the EU, as the Libertas website states.”
It would help ease some of the problems of rotating presidencies, with the lack of continuity and the burden on individual prime ministers.
Prof Dermot Walsh of the University of Limerick said that major changes in our criminal justice system being brought in by our membership of the EU would be given a significant boost by the Lisbon Treaty.
“These changes are unprecedented in speed and scope since the demise of the Brehon law system,” he said.
The architecture of the traditional Irish criminal process was undergoing a period of rapid and fundamental change, which reflected the emergence of a distinct EU criminal process.
Lisbon would take these changes to a new level, and an opt-out by Ireland would not change the underlying reality.
He said this was happening because the free movement of criminals must be countered by the free movement of criminal justice, and the distribution of the EU billions must be protected by EU mechanisms for combating fraud.
However, he warned that a community’s sense of identity and familiarity with its criminal law must be preserved, and it was essential to ensure that effective remedies were available to correct mistakes and abuses in the EU criminal justice process.
The fundamental values of transparency, accountability, democracy, human rights and the rule of law must be preserved.