When in June 1950 Europeans were planning the European Community,
Robert Schuman told the assembled delegates:
“We would very much wish that the United Kingdom were present at our discussions. We cannot conceive Europe without it. We know, and this reassures us in our efforts, that the British Government wants the success of our work.”
Schuman knew Britain was essential for preserving European democracy.
Today non-British MEPs are in turmoil about democracy. About time! Let’s have some
REAL democracy
in Strasbourg and Brussels! Some MEPs want to take over British MEPs
jobs on the committees. They want to redistribute key posts on the
assumption that UK will leave the European Parliament. MEP Guy
Verhofstadt said complex Brexit discussions should be wrapped up in 15
months. He wants the UK MEPs out of Parliament. “It would be nonsense
for UK to be voting for new MEPs in 2019”– the date of the next European
elections. Doesn’t that reveal a bullying attitude, the very opposite
to the spirit of democracy?
Wouldn’t Democracy be better served if he urged British MEPs to stay as
long as possible to help implement real European democracy?
Many MEPs are confused about the nature of European Communities and
European democracy.
Does
democracy mean shutting the mouths of those you disagree with? Wouldn’t
Europe benefit from those who point out democratic mistakes? The United
Kingdom clearly has a much longer democratic tradition than some Member
States that only began to implement a democratic system and the Rule of
Law in this generation.
Flaws are flagrant. The Brussels Politburo has
NEVER yet implemented
the requirements of the treaties for proper European elections! Europe
has 28 national elections each fiddled and fixed by national government
parties to exclude ‘critics’ they call populists! What democrats!
Then they think British MEPs should leave as soon as the
legally dubious Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty is activated.
Wrong!
This process as well as the Lisbon Treaty itself is illegal!
Europeans need a
European Election. That’s common sense. It’s also what the treaties require! The Brussels Politburo has
NEVER yet implemented the requirements of the treaties for proper European elections!
Some Brexiteers are also confused or ignorant.
In a
BBC interview
UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson suggested the two-year Brexit
process should be over before May 2019 so UK need not elect MEPs in the
European Parliament elections that month.
Not so.
Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty replaced
Article 240 of the European Economic Community Treaty. This Article said that the Treaty was ‘
concluded for an unlimited period.’ Lawyers called this the ‘
permanency clause‘ or the ‘
perpetuity clause‘.
They understood it to mean membership was permanent. It guaranteed that
States would only seek democratic solutions in good faith.
Some politicians thought they could do better than the Founding
Fathers. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to be more democratic than them and
provide for an option for democrats to be undemocratic. In other words
LEAVE Europe’s democratic institutions, rather than make them more
democratic. The way they phrased the Exit Article 50, showed they lacked
basic notions of both logic and democracy.
Here’s what
Lord Kerr, the Secretary of the body, the Convention, that came up with this nonsense, said:
“I thought the circumstances in which it would be used, if ever,
would be when there was a coup in a Member State and the EU suspended
that country’s membership. … I thought that at that point the dictator
in question might be so cross that he’d say ‘right, I’m off’ and it
would be good to have a procedure under which he could leave.” He said
he never envisioned that a British government might resort to it.
That shows that something is morally off-track. In Brussels and
Strasbourg. The UK should never have been forced into a position that
people thought that the only way to deal with Brussels chicanery would
be to vote to Leave.
But it is worse than that. Article 50 is also illegal by national and
international law. These crazy revisers of the European Economic treaty
did not directly change the Treaty of Rome. They presented their EXIT
clause first in what they called the “Constitution”– in reality a treaty
called the Constitutional Treaty. It was written by the “Convention”of
which as mentioned Lord Kerr was the Secretary and Valery Giscard
d’Estaing was chairman. What is now Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty was
word for word Article 59 of the Constitutional Treaty.
What many MEPs and many of the Politburo refuse to acknowledge — YET —
is that Article 50 is illegal. Why? Because the whole of the
Constitutional Treaty was put to the vote in France and elsewhere. The
people voted it down. It is null and void. In the French
Constitution Article 3:
“National sovereignty is vested in the people, who shall
exercise it through their representatives and by means of a Referendum.
No section of the people, nor any individual may arrogate to itself or
himself the exercise thereof.”
Hence Article 50 Also Known As Article 59 is dead. It is illegal to
use it! But French politicians forced the exact same treaty through
their Parliament by dubious means. By their own Constitution, French
politicians cannot overturn the French Referendum NON.
The French political class know the Lisbon Treaty article 50 is a fraud. This is what the French presidential candidate
Emmanuel Macron said when I asked him about it.
Was it a good idea not to take the first referendum NON
seriously? Should governments purposefully prevent the French people
from having its voice as sovereign power?
“It was a mistake,” he told me.
Most lawyers are hard-pressed to find the equivalent example of an
Exit Clause in any Union of States. The first Constitution of the
Soviet Union in 1919 is one notable exception. But whether it had
theoretical or practical value is a matter of doubt.
It is common sense that a democratic organization should improve
itself by becoming more democratic, not by rejecting criticism and
causing the messenger to leave. That is why all three Communities (ECSC,
EEC, Euratom) have articles to revise and improve the their treaties.
The concept introduced with Maastricht to make a single bag treaty with
targets and goals in a wide variety of sectors and domains (external
affairs, Justice, Home Affairs etc) shows that politicians had already
lost the plot about democratic legitimacy, accountability and popular
support of such measures by referendums. They were more interested in
establishing personal power.
However, the second Treaty of Rome, the Euratom Treaty was not affected
by their fiddlings. Euratom has exactly the same wording in its Article
208. It also has the same institutions. It is not affected by Lisbon’s
Article 50. Membership of the European Atomic Energy Community is
permanent.
So is UK’s obligation in the Euratom Treaty to hold elections for the European Parliament in 2019. Come what may!
Check it out all the details! CLICK HERE : Brexit and Britain’s Vision for Europe at special discount prices 
Letter sent to French Presidency and Members of European Parliament, Commission Vice President Suica, and Democracy spokesperson.
see full text at
eurDemocracy.substack.com
Dear Conference presidents,
I am a journalist accredited in Brussels and Editor of the Schuman Project.
On 19 April 2021 (the day after the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Paris, founding the European Community) Vice President of the Commission Mme Dubravka Suica, Mme Zacarias of the Portuguese EU presidency and Mr Guy Verhofstadt of the EP held a press conference at the Commission launching the Conference on the Future of Europe.
I asked that the original documents on Democracy agreed and signed by the Founding Fathers be published to facilitate the debate and conference decisions on European democracy.
All three institutions agreed that they would be published for the Conference and analysed.
They still have NOT BEEN PUBLISHED!