Outcry over muddled wording of treaty text

Date: 26/06/1997

By Rory Watson

THE Dutch government is under pressure to change parts of the newly agreed Treaty of Amsterdam following complaints about the text agreed amid enormous confusion in the closing minutes of last week's summit.

But diplomats are stressing that any changes must not reopen the package painfully tied up after almost two years of negotiations.

Barely had the ink dried on the 146-page text approved by EU leaders than the Dutch presidency was being contacted by member states pointing to discrepancies between its contents and what they believed had been agreed. “There have already been a number of complaints. But these are for the Dutch to sort out,” Luxembourg's EU ambassador Jean-Jacques Kasel said this week as his government prepared to take over the Union presidency next Tuesday (1 July).

The confusing and fudged outcome of the Intergovernmental Conference has also been strongly criticised by former European Commission President Jacques Delors, who attacked the failure to agree central institutional questions and described the outcome as “a catastrophic result”.

“The central aim of the IGC should have been how to adapt the EU's institutional framework in the perspective of a Union of 26 or perhaps 30 members. But from the very beginning this idea disappeared and they concentrated on just making selective amendments to the Maastricht Treaty, keeping the most difficult institutional questions to the very end,” he told European Voice.

Delors, who played a key role in drafting the Maastricht Treaty single currency text, also criticised EU governments for failing to prepare the ground properly for this IGC. “When you want to reform the treaty, it is in everyone's interest to ask a committee of experts to clarify the questions which should be tackled. That is what was done with the greatest care on monetary union and the subsequent text was readable. It was not done on this occasion and so we had a catastrophic result reached in an appalling atmosphere,” he said.

Most of the problems with the text which emerged from Amsterdam are linguistic or grammatical in nature and will be settled by lawyers and translators. But EU ambassadors have been forced to reconsider two substantive issues relating to the border-free Schengen Convention and the legislative powers of the European Parliament.

“There are still things in the treaty which are a mess. Almost every delegation has raised something,” said one senior diplomat.

The most striking discrepancy revolves around the procedure allowing Ireland and the UK to remain outside the Schengen agreement and yet be able to choose to sign up to specific activities already agreed by its members. The draft text submitted to the summit indicated that such participation could be blocked by a qualified majority vote by Schengen members. But the wording which finally emerged last week stated: “The Council shall decide on the request with the unanimity if (sic) its members.”

The second problem involves the decision to extend the legislative powers MEPs share with EU governments. The Dutch intended that this development should go hand in hand with an extension of majority voting in the Council of Ministers. But as EU leaders rushed to bring their meeting to a close, they may inadvertently have given MEPs greater legislative powers than they intended.

The summit trimmed back the Dutch majority voting list, insisting that unanimity should remain for EU decisions on the right of free movement and residence in the Union, certain social security provisions and the status of the self-employed. But the proposal that the Parliament should enjoy greater powers to amend, and even reject, legislation in these areas emerged unscathed.