France bows to inevitable over charter

Date: 28/09/00

After months of negotiations, the men and women tasked with drawing up an EU 'bill of rights' have completed their work. It will now be up to Union leaders to decide whether to approve the text they have drafted and what status to give it.

Arguments over the charter have focused on two key issues: details of the chapter on social issues and proposed clauses on subjects such as the right to strike; and whether the document should be made legally binding or not.

After much agonising, France has decided to abandon its fight to get the charter incorporated into the EU treaty which emerges from the current round of Intergovernmental Conference negotiations - not because it has been convinced by the arguments against doing so, but because it has decided to sacrifice this goal in order to get agreement on a more wide-ranging set of social rights.

Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner António Vitorino tried to undermine the case against making the text legally binding earlier this month by showing that it was not being used to extend the Union's powers. But if that is the case, say critics, why have some member states pressed so hard for it to be included in the EU treaty in the face of fierce opposition from others?

The argument stems from a fundamental split over what the charter was designed to achieve which has clouded all the subsequent negotiations on its content. As so often happens at Union level, member states went into the negotiations with very different visions of what constituted 'fundamental' rights and what sort of document would emerge from the talks. While countries such as France wanted to use the exercise to ensure that the Union's free market was balanced by a social conscience, others such as the UK insisted that it should be a purely symbolic exercise, pulling together people's existing rights in a ringing political declaration.

The emerging agreement on the content and status of the charter therefore, inevitably, tries to be all things to all men. It contains many of the social rights which France wanted to include, but will not be legally binding. Many would argue that this has therefore been a pointless exercise. Instead, they say, the charter should have focused on a much narrower range of genuinely fundamental rights which could have been given the force of law. It is, however, hard to see how countries such as the UK with a fiercely Eurosceptical population ever wary of ceding more power to 'Brussels' would have been able to sign up to this - and making the current, far more wide-ranging draft text legally binding is a political non-runner.

France therefore had little option but to back down. Given the enormity of the challenge facing governments as they try to agree on issues crucial to prepare the Union for enlargement - such as plans to extend qualified majority voting to more policy areas and change the share-out of member states' votes in the Council of Ministers - going to the wall over this issue would have been an unnecessary and potentially highly damaging sideshow.