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EDICOLA / KIOSK | LADINCagliari, September 28. 2003
The Vth General Assembly of CONSEU, held
in Cagliari (Sardinia) on 26, 27 and 28 September
2003,
Has examined the "Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for
Europe", as prepared by the European Convention, a project which
will start being discussed by the Intergovernmental Conference in
Rome from 4 October 2003.
I - The participants at the CONSEU have welcomed some
positive contributions to the text, especially as
regards:
- The recognition of diversity as one of the Union's founding
principles;
- The recognition of the Union's legal personality;
- The inclusion of the Charter of Fundamental Rights within the
constitutional corpus;
- The affirmation of the principle of non-discrimination at all
levels, particularly within the cultural and linguistic
spheres;
- The establishment of direct participative democracy, by means
of which EU-citizens can take part.
II - The participants regret that some of the fundamental
democratic principles stated in Part I of the text, which defines
the objectives of the Union, are not systematically developed in
Part III, which is devoted to the policies and functioning of the
Union.
This can be most clearly seen by taking the following
circumstances into account:
- There is no reference in articles III-3 and III-8 to language
and culture as a motive of discrimination to be prohibited, while
these two articles include other motives of discrimination;
- The limited competences of the European Parliament are being
kept in favour of a competing bicephalous legislative power,
distributed between this institution -which is established on the
base of universal suffrage-, and the respective executive powers
of member states. And this distribution is contrary to the
democratic principle of division of powers;
- Participative democracy, a tool of EU citizens, is subject to
the consent of the executive body, which is represented by the
European Commission, and is bound to the postponed until a
European law is enacted in the future on the concrete conditions
under which participative democracy is to be carried out;
- The terminology used fot the concepts of state, nation and
people is ambiguous;
III - The participants denounce that:
- The notion of sovereignty of the peoples is being left aside
and the notion of sovereignty of the states is being maintained,
as the stated principle of sovereignty of EU citizens is not
guaranteed by any concrete measure;
- There are not any institutions and rules enabling European
peoples to exercise their sovereignty within the EU, and the
existence of such peoples as subjects of law is not being
effectively recognised, thus benefiting the constituted
states;
- The only approach that is being used, in a deliberate and
unchangeable way, is that of the existing state frameworks, and
no reference is made to the right of self-determination exercised
by means of a democratic process by those European peoples which
for historical reasons have been deprived of sovereignty. This
fact is in blatant contradiction with legal rules ratified by the
European states, especially the Helsinki Final Act and the
Charter of Paris of 1990;
- The stated principle of cultural and linguistic diversity is
being denied in practice, as only the official languages of
member states are being recognised as EU languages, and member
states keep having a monopoly over the contents of teaching and
education programmes, thus enabling them to allow the persistence
of existing discrimination of the so-called lesser-used languages
and cultures, and thus also endangering peace within
Europe;
- There is a serious risk that economic rules based on market
economy and liberalism become constitutionalised, thus allowing
that economic competitive relations which may endanger the
balance of the weakest and underdeveloped European peoples become
perennial and that inequalities in the exchange with the rest of
peoples of the world (within the framework of globalisation)
persist.
IV - As a consequence, in order to consolidate and
develop the democratic character of the European Union, the
participants propose to:
- introduce within the constitutional corpus the essential right
to self-determination for each one of the European peoples, which
shall be able to regain full sovereignty once they are able to
express it through democratic means, as well as to introduce the
right of each people to be eligible for entering the EU;
- create a Chamber of the Peoples, which is to ensure that the
Peoples are democratically represented at the legislative level
of the EU;
- establish a Conference of Nations within (in space and time)
the European Intergovernmental Conference and within the Council
of Ministers. This Conference should be aimed at ensuring that
the Peoples be represented in the wording of rules that have an
impact on the Union's executive power, concomitantly with the
Commission;
- devolve the Union's legislative power entirely to the two only
chambers whose power arises from democratic representation, as
the Commission and the Intergovernmental Conference can only
submit proposals in this area;
- grant constitutional recognition of equality of rights for all
languages and cultures within the EU and of their respective
right to develop as a challenge for conserving common cultural
richness and diversity;
- In a transitional phase, create a Surveillance Committee for
Languages and Cultures which are not granted a state-level
statute within the framework of the Commission; this Committee
would have the capacity to collect complaints, to carry out the
research needed to elaborate them, to directly lodge them to the
European Court of Human Rights (to prosecute discriminatory
measures or treatment), and to carry out general surveys and
submit a yearly report to the Commission and the
Parliament;
- take into consideration and launch the proposals put forward,
on the part of the involved institutions, in order to fully
ensure the Union's democratic character, at the latest during the
2004-2009 European legislative term.
Taking this approach into account, the CONSEU wishes to forward
its proposals for the modification of the current constitutional
treaty to MEPs, as well as to all appropriate European
institutions. Likewise, it will submit them to representatives of
EU-candidate states and to concerned non-governmental
organisations. The CONSEU will assume the task of dissemination
in the media, so that all citizens of the future Europe learn of
them.
Moreover, the participants at the CONSEU, concerned about the
challenges of globalisation, have decided that the next General
Assembly of the CONSEU will discuss issues regarding identity and
the contributions and causes of migratory phenomena in
Europe.