Treaties set for a ‘spring-cleaning’

Date: 25/07/1996

MEMBER states searching for ways to simplify existing EU treaties have been presented with almost a dozen different options for making them more 'user-friendly'.

The wide-ranging political consequences of each choice are contained in a report handed to Intergovernmental Conference negotiators earlier this week. This will be followed by a second, more substantive, submission in November providing concrete examples of how the fundamental Union texts might look after a 'spring-cleaning'.

The two reports are designed to provide lawyers involved in the simplification exercise with essential political guidance from the IGC on the degree of radicalism to be brought to the task.

At one end of the spectrum, the exercise to clean up over 40 years of EU constitutional expansion could be limited to simply deleting obsolete articles from a dozen different treaties.

At its most ambitious, the task could involve combining and restructuring over 800 separate articles and numerous protocols into a single text.

Lawyers estimate that simply deleting obsolete references from the European Economic Community's Treaty of Rome would result in the disappearance of over 50 articles, making the text much easier to read.

Codifying and merging the three founding EU treaties into one or, even more ambitiously, integrating them into the Maastricht Treaty, would lead to the disappearance of almost 100 articles which are duplicated several times in the various texts.

But there is less scope for such wholesale pruning of the Union's two other founding treaties on the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Atomic Energy Community, because each concerns particular industries and contains greater detail.

The first would yield just four articles and the second ten.

Despite the difficulties involved, there is now general agreement among governments and EU institutions that the Union's various treaties have become increasingly complex - and less readable - and that the IGC provides a unique opportunity to reverse this trend.

But even at its simplest, the exercise soon leaves the world of legal certainty and enters the world of politics.

The Council of Ministers' legal service carrying out the task is now seeking political guidance from governments on what approach to take.

“Technically it is possible to merge the three treaties into Maastricht without changing the juridical provisions. But political issues are also involved,” said one Brussels lawyer, pointing to sensitivities over nuclear energy and the integrationist nature of the ECSC treaty.

Member states will also have to decide whether to restructure any fully-merged treaty to prevent it being a single daunting text of at least 500 articles.

Among the ideas now circulating is the possibility of creating a first section of some 150 articles setting out the Union's fundamental aims, including its basic principles, institutional arrangements, citizenship and external relations provisions.

A second, more technical section, would then provide details on free movement, economic and monetary union and various sectoral policies.

Although waiting for a political steer, the simplification exercise has already laid down two clear ground rules.

To avoid reigniting old arguments, it will not involve redrafting the wording of individual articles. Nor will it take on board the results of other discussions at this IGC, although these could be slotted into the text at a later date.

“The two are separate. It is important the public can identify with the outcome of the IGC. If the two become confused, the public cannot know which changes come from the simplification exercise and which ones come from the IGC. They should be judged separately,” said one EU diplomat.