Amato: simplified text could still do the job

A group of senior EU politicians led by Italian Justice Minister Giuliano Amato has called for the constitution to be replaced by a shorter simplified treaty which still maintains nearly all of its institutional innovations in two additional protocols.

Presenting the report of the Action Committee for European Democracy (ACED) in Brussels on 4 June, Amato said that the group’s approach was to "balance the views of those who had ratified the constitutional treaty" with those who failed to do so or faced difficulties.

The ACED, consisting of 16 leading EU politicians including two current commissioners, is calling for a slimmed down treaty of only 71 articles compared to the 448 in the constitution and a total of 12,800 words compared to the constitution’s 63,000. Unlike the simplified treaty proposed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, which is winning increasing support from other EU leaders, the text proposed by the Amato group would retain the majority of Part I of the constitution, dealing with institutional issues, replacing the current EU treaty. The Charter of Fundamental Rights would be dropped from the text but replaced by a clause. Instead of Part III of the treaty, dealing with detailed policy provisions, the European Community (EC) treaty would be amended to reflect all the institutional changes of the new treaty through two new protocols. One would deal with the institutional innovations of the constitution such as the extension of codecision to new policies and the other with policies including the possibility of giving the EU competence to deal with new challenges like climate change. The preamble to the constitution and the article referring to the EU’s symbols, the flag and the anthem, would be dropped. But Amato, a former vice-president of the Convention which drafted the constitution, insisted on the need to preserve the articles from the constitution giving the Union a single legal personality.

A group of senior EU politicians led by Italian Justice Minister Giuliano Amato has called for the constitution to be replaced by a shorter simplified treaty which still maintains nearly all of its institutional innovations in two additional protocols.