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Monday, April 23, 2007

Some new red lines

The Sunday Times has a piece setting out the Government's four "Red lines" for the forthcoming negotiations. Needless to say, all of them are already pretty much agreed - so not likely to provoke a massive battle.

* Making it clear that its an "amending treaty" not a "constitution": check
* Getting out the Charter of Fundamental Rights: check
* Remove primacy over national law: check
* Getting rid of single legal personality for the EU: check?

As usual the red lines are all about distracting from what is being given up:

* EU President
* EU Foreign Minister (though they'll change the name)
* Voting changes to pass even more legislation (e.g. in criminal justice, or getting rid of our opt out from the social chapter...)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

ahem--isn't it already recognised that EC/EU law has precedence over national law (Costa vs ENEL)?

You can take this provisiojn out of any Treaty, but I doubt you can get it out of EU jurisprudence som easily.

Anonymous said...

Also the UK gave up the opt out from the Social Chapter back in 1999, when the Treaty of Amsterdam came into force...

Notice also that Merkel's letter is suggesting additional opt-outs from any 'new' policies in the next Treaty.

Open Europe blog team said...

2nd anon - good spot - what I meant to write was the individual opt-out from the 48 hour working week in the Working Time Directive.