Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-11-Speech-2-156"
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"en.20050111.10.2-156"2
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"Mr President, the last thing I want to do is to spoil a party. Over the next 48 hours this Parliament will spend hundreds of thousands of euro on celebrating the Constitution. We shall have balloons, a laser display, an orchestra; but I cannot help feeling that all this is a touch premature. In at least ten countries there must be a referendum before ratification. We cannot call the result of those polls with certainty. Not a single ballot has yet been cast. If it were only the party that was premature, it would be rather curmudgeonly of me to object, but we are anticipating the Constitution in other more important ways. We are, for example, pushing ahead with the creation of an EU diplomatic service, a proposal which, pending formal ratification, has no legal basis. In the field of justice and home affairs we have gone even further, pre-empting many of the Constitution's clauses, in particular those to do with the creation of a pan-European legal system and a European public prosecutor. Before the Constitution had even been signed, let alone ratified, the European Court of Justice had indicated that it would treat the Charter of Fundamental Rights as justiciable.
Asked formally by this House what parts of the Constitution they intended to implement without waiting for official ratification, only five of the current Commissioners answered that it would be wrong to anticipate the results of the national referendums. The other 20 all replied in one way or another that they intended to forge ahead at once without waiting for the outcome of the national ballots.
This is meant to be a democratic chamber, but its attitude sometimes recalls Bertolt Brecht's famous couplet 'Let us dismiss the people and elect another in their place'. I hope my country will vote 'no' to the Constitution and I am campaigning to that end, but if I lose, I shall accept the result with good grace. I would urge those of you who support the Constitution to display a similar respect for the democratic process and not to try to implement large parts of this Constitution even if one or more Member States has voted against it. No means no."@en1
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