Wednesday, July 07, 2010

German Constitutional Court complaint extended to full 440 billion package

Open Europe reports this today with their main links all in German. A good explanation appears on their blog however and that is linked from here. Two items I would like to highlight are quoted herewith: Firstly a written Council Answer to Question H-0237-09 7th May 2009 regarding what is now Article 122/ "The Council recalls the terms of the Declaration on Article 100 of the Treaty establishing the European Community, which is attached to the Nice Treaty. According to this declaration, "decisions regarding financial assistance, such as are provided for in Article 100 and are compatible with the 'no bail-out' rule laid down in Article 103, must comply" with the provisions of the inter-institutional agreement on budgetary discipline and financial perspectives." Secondly the third point raised by the blog but apparently not included in the German complaint: ...the EU Treaties clearly specify that any decision that involves the EU’s budget must be taken by unanimity, meaning that individual member states have a veto over any agreement. The stabilisation fund clearly does involve the EU budget, as the loans are backed by the budget and any defaults will be covered by the budget (there are even p.m. lines in the EU budget for the fund) – and yet it was decided by majority vote. Moving from unanimity to QMV is a transfer of power which needs the approval of national parliaments. The decision taken by Qualified Majority Voting on the stabilisation packages should therefore have been subject to non-eurogroup Council Member veto, had any the courage to wield it! Meantime the vote on the "Economic Government" of the EU, code for full federalisation has been deferred until September, praise be, by which time the real problems of the euro currency and multiple defaults may have perhaps been faced making the matter moot. The Irish Times has the report, linked here.

Labels: ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home