Speech: Safeguarding the rule of law and solving the Copenhagen dilemma: Towards a new EU-mechanism

Text of a speech by Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission, EU Justice Commissioner, at the General Affairs Council, Luxembourg, 22 April 2013.

Main Messages:

What we are lacking is a better developed set of instruments to fill the gaps between the "soft power" of political persuasion, the role of the Commission as the guardian of the Treaties and the "nuclear option" of Article 7.

President Barroso has called for better instruments, and the Commission has started developing them. We note that the letter of the four Foreign Ministers appears to go in a similar direction, and we welcome this political support.

We see this process as more for the medium than the short term. While not excluding any scope for further action under the current Treaties, we also believe that it would be appropriate to include this subject matter into future reflection on the Treaty as well. Because creating an effective new mechanism will require legitimacy and acceptance by all Member States as it would give the Commission a new role that we do not currently have.

The rule of law requires that individual cases are solved under the rules in place at this moment in time. We must not create new rules for a particular case. This would go against the very nature of the rule of law.

We [the Commission] will also discuss possible solutions to solve the "Copenhagen dilemma" with the European Parliament. Because the Commission believes that we will need to have a broad agreement across all institutions on the scope and functioning of such a new mechanism before we can take this further.