Poles give ground on voting to pave way for treaty accord

Poland has dropped its insistence on the right to delay decisions in the EU for up to two years, removing one of the biggest potential stumbling blocks to a quick deal on a new treaty.

Poland’s Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga said on Monday (23 July) at the launch of the treaty-drafting intergovernmental conference (IGC) that she "would not insist" on the two-year delay, although she said that this had been one of Poland’s proposals at the summit in June.

EU leaders agreed in June a broad outline for a new reform treaty to replace the EU constitution, which was rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands. Government leaders accepted, as part of the deal, a revised version of the so-called Ioaninna compromise. This would allow countries that only have three-quarters of the votes needed to form a blocking minority to ask for more time to find broader support against a decision.

After the summit Polish Prime Minister Jarosław Kazcynski said that he had been promised that decisions could be delayed up to two years. But EU leaders denied this figure had been mentioned.

The current language on the compromise refers to reaching a decision "within a reasonable time and without prejudicing obligatory time limits laid down by Union law". Under the co-decision procedure the Council of Ministers has to reach a decision within three months or risk seeing decisions fall.

Fotyga said, though, that the revised Ioaninna compromise should be included in the new treaty, giving it formal legal status, instead of simply being a declaration as it was in the constitution.

Portuguese Foreign Minister Luís Amado said that Fotyga had made a "positive and constructive contribution" to launching the IGC.

But Poland came under fire from two of the MEPs representing the European Parliament on the IGC for seeking to follow the UK in limiting the scope of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Poland said at the June summit that it was considering signing up to a protocol obtained by the UK which seek to limit the application of the charter.

UK Liberal Democrat MEP Andrew Duff, one of three MEPs on the IGC, said that Poland’s position was "absurd". He warned that if the "infection" of more countries seeking to join the UK’s opt-out spread, "it could destroy the charter".

German centre-right MEP Elmar Brok said that the assembly would "make sure that rights in the charter are not picked away at".

But Ireland appeared on Monday to abandon the right it was given at the summit to join the UK on the charter. Dick Roche, the Irish minister for European Affairs, did not raise the issue at the launch of the IGC and told a press conference afterwards that "that caveat no longer exists".

The Irish government was criticised by opposition parties and trade unions when it emerged that Ireland was one of two delegations considering joining the UK. Roche insisted it was never the government’s intention to use the opt-out but "to understand the implications of the British opt-out".

• The Portuguese presidency presented to the foreign ministers a 277-page draft text made up of two treaties (one modifying the EU treaty and another on the functioning of the EU) including 67 pages of protocols and 63 pages of declarations. National governments’ legal experts will now examine the draft. The Portuguese could convene a meeting of sherpas, government leaders’ top EU advisers, to try to resolve any difficult political issues. Foreign ministers will take stock of the progress in negotiations at their informal meeting in Portugal on 7-8 September. The final text is meant to be approved at the EU summit on 18 October.

• The Irish minister for European affairs, Dick Roche, has said that he sees no particular difficulty in Ireland being the only member state to organise a referendum on the new reform treaty.

But he did acknowledge that the Irish referendum campaign would be a magnet for those opposed to the treaty.

"Obviously a lot of people around Europe who want to see this process - for a variety of reasons which have nothing to do with Ireland or Ireland’s well-being - defeated will coalesce in Ireland. That means we have to be stronger," Roche said.

He said that political parties, trade unions, business groups and the farming community would have to campaign for the treaty but that it would not be a "walk-over".

"You have to be prepared to argue the positives, the benefits, the good things that are coming and you shouldn’t be going into a referendum with a stick over people’s heads saying ‘if you don’t do this, something awful is going to happen’. I think that is the lesson of Nice I," he said, referring to the rejection of the Nice treaty in a referendum in June 2001. A second vote, held in 2002, had a positive result.

Poland has dropped its insistence on the right to delay decisions in the EU for up to two years, removing one of the biggest potential stumbling blocks to a quick deal on a new treaty.