There are opinions to suit all taste this week. According to EurActiv:
EU leaders have almost all declined a proposal by French President Jacques Chirac to save the EU Constitution by splitting it up into single chapters and integrating those into the existing EU framework.
The EU observer puts it more bluntly - The Hague says constitution is ‘dead’:
The Dutch foreign minister Bernard Bot has said the EU constitution is “dead” for the Netherlands, rejecting EU leaders’ recent pleas for a resuscitation of the charter.
So it seems, at the end of the day, there will be no low-lying fruit, like cherries, just there for the pickin. Time to start building some ladders I think.
2 Responses
Feed: A Fistful of Euros
January 12th, 2006 at 7:20 pm
Maybe a ladder… But some time too. There’s no way anyone is going to make any progress on this until parliamentary elections in Netherlands and presidential elections in France, both taking place in 2007. For the moment we’ll be stuck with this farce of arguing whether the Constitution is dead or not.
January 17th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
But haven’t some already been picked, such as the Council Conclusions on transparency of Council Meetings in December 2005 and the earlier progress on human rights proofing Commission legislative proposals in the light (amongst other things) of the Charter?
And is this really “cherry picking”? Or is it merely the logical consequences of the longterm commitments in the Treaty of Maastricht to fundamental rights and to transparency - consequences from which the Member States are not walking away?