Chirac says ‘No’ to God in constitution

Date: 23/01/03

By Simon Coss

THE debate over whether God and religion should get a specific mention in any future EU constitution moved up a gear this week when some of the Union's leading figures waded into the fray.

On Monday, French President Jacques Chirac made it clear that he would oppose any efforts to include religious references in the text, which is currently being drafted by the Convention on Europe's future.

"There has never been that kind of reference in the treaties. As the representative of a secular state, I am not in favour of religious references," Chirac told a French newspaper.

Belgian Foreign Affairs Minister Louis Michel is also "radically against a religious reference. This is absolutely unacceptable", he said.

Secularism, or a clear separation of powers between the Church and the state, is a founding principle of the French republic that dates back to the 1789 revolution.

French diplomats confirmed that Paris would oppose efforts to include pro-religious references in the constitution in the same way that it vetoed similar clauses in the 2000 EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Chirac's stand will come as a blow to his political allies in the European Parliament.

Last week the centre-right European People's Party (EPP) approved a draft preamble to a future European constitution, which mentions both God and religion. The text, based on wording in the Polish constitution, reads: "The Union values include the values of those who believe in God as the source of truth, justice, good and beauty as well as of those who do not share such belief but respect these universal values arising from other sources."

The proposal's author, German MEP Joachim Wuermeling, rejected criticisms that his text would lead to division between non-believers and the religious if it ever became binding.

"We don't want to get into a battle over this. But we believe the European Union should be a Union of values and religious values are the greatest values Europe has," he said.

However, Wuermeling also insisted that his text was "tolerant and open to different kinds of religions as well as non-believers".

He added that a number of leading Convention members who had put their names to his text - including former Irish Prime Minister John Bruton, a member of the Convention's praesidium, and MEP Elmar Brok - were setting up a working group to further discuss the question of religion in the constitution.

But Wuermeling's critics have been quick to condemn the German MEP's plan.

"The text proposed is so all-embracing that frankly I don't see why you need any of it," Keith Porteous-Wood, head of the UK's National Secular Society, told this paper.

Porteous-Wood added that religious freedom is already guaranteed in the EU, both by the 1999 Amsterdam Treaty and the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

The Convention's spokesman Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut said this was a "very difficult and delicate problem," for the forum.

At the moment, the reference to religion is not included in the articles the praesidium is drafting. However, the issue will be discussed at the Convention's next plenary meeting on 6-7 February.

The Vatican, which strongly supports efforts to include a reference to religion, also stoked further controversy this week over the question of mixing religion and politics.

In an extensive document, approved by Pope John Paul II, the Holy See called on Catholic politicians to obey the Church's teachings when carrying out their elected duties.

In particular, said the document, Catholic politicians had a "grave and clear obligation" to oppose abortion and euthanasia. MEPs were also told to fight any efforts to give homosexual couples equal status to married people.

French President Jacques Chirac has made it clear that he would oppose any efforts to include religious references in the text of the draft EU constitution.