October IGC summit to be dominated by charter battle

Date: 29/06/2000

By Simon Taylor

When EU leaders gather in Biarritz in October, French European Affairs Minister Pierre Moscovici will be hoping that the cool Atlantic breeze will blow away the storm clouds hovering over the planned EU charter of fundamental rights and ease the way for an agreement two months later in Nice.

While the informal summit will discuss progress in discussions on treaty reforms in the ongoing Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), decisions on the difficult issues which governments must settle will only be taken at the 11th hour during the Nice summit in December.

Some progress should have been made by October, with the French stepping up the work-rate from July with weekly meeting of officials and special monthly sessions of foreign ministers. But, although Biarritz will provide a useful snapshot of the state of play in the negotiations, the main focus of the meeting will be the charter.

The 62-strong convention drawing up a draft text needs to complete its work by October so that EU leaders can get down to the hard bargaining. The broad outlines of the planned charter are already discernible thanks to the progress made by the convention in the run-up to the Feira summit.

The EU's 'bill of rights' is likely to be divided into three parts: a section on basic civil and political rights, drawing largely on existing conventions; another on economic and social rights; and a third, wider chapter on the status and scope of the charter.

While the first area is relatively uncontroversial because the set of freedoms concerned are well established - including the right to free expression, association and religion - the second group promises to be more challenging.

Most countries might agree on the value of fundamental social rights such as freedom from discrimination, but the question of how these rights are ensured in practice is answered very differently by each member state, depending on its national culture and traditions. The UK, for example, has a well-established set of rules to protect against racial discrimination, but asking other countries to apply the same regime would pose huge difficulties.

The issue of whether - and if so, how - rights enshrined in the charter should be made legally enforceable will be the most difficult for the French presidency to solve. Paris favours a set of constitutional rights for European citizens while, at the other extreme, the UK insists that the charter should merely bring together existing rights and be more of a declaration than a legally binding instrument.

In between lie a large number of countries which are happy to see rights enshrined in law provided no new ones are added and those which want new rights such as media freedom included in the charter.

Bridging these gaps will require more than just the cooling breezes coming from the Atlantic.

When EU leaders gather in Biarritz in October 2000, French European Affairs Minister Pierre Moscovici will be hoping that the cool Atlantic breeze will blow away the storm clouds hovering over the planned EU charter of fundamental rights and ease the way for an agreement two months later in Nice. Article forms part of a survey on the French EU Presidency, July-December 2000.