Barroso maakt zich geen zorgen over opstelling Slowakije (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso i has said he is confident that the Lisbon Treaty will be ratified shortly, despite comments made by Slovakia's prime minister over the weekend regarding a possible opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
"All the countries of the EU have now approved the Lisbon Treaty, either by referendum in Ireland or by parliament in all the others," said Mr Barroso in Brussels on Monday (19 October).
"Now we have to complete the procedures of ratification and I'm sure that will be done relatively soon. I'm very confident," he added, with Czech President Vaclav Klaus i still to sign off on the pact on behalf of Prague.
Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico told national television over the weekend that any special terms negotiated by the Czech Republic regarding the charter - which is attached to Lisbon and will become legally-binding when the treaty comes into force - would also have to apply to Slovakia.
Although the Charter of Fundamental Rights was barely mentioned during Slovakia's internal debate on the ratification of Lisbon, a decision last week by Mr Klaus to seek an opt-out or Irish-style legal guarantee on the charter has raised fresh concerns in Slovakia.
"If one says that the Czechs are exempted from the rule then there is a rule, and Slovaks need to be exempted as well to have parity and to reduce any ambiguity," Radoslav Prochazka, a Slovak lawyer specialising in community law, told this website.
The debate surrounds the Benes Decrees - a set of laws issued during and immediately after World War II, under which "enemies of the state" were expelled from Czechoslovakia and their land was confiscated.
Mr Klaus has said that charter clauses on property rights would open the door to land claims by Germans who lost territory under the Benes Decrees, while in Slovakia any such hypothetical claims would more likely be made by ethnic Hungarians.
The Czech Republic's chances of securing some form of opt-out from the charter appear small, but Slovakia's are almost non-existent due to the fact that the country has already ratified the Lisbon Treaty, Mr Prochazka said.
Although still part of the body of official legislation in Slovakia, Mr Prochazka explained that the Benes Decrees are now largely redundant in their effect.
Most analysts believe that Mr Klaus' sudden decision to raise the issue last week is little more than a new delaying tactic to put off his Lisbon signature for even longer.
A nightmare scenario for Lisbon enthusiasts is that the eurosceptic Mr Klaus successfully holds off on signing the document until UK elections next year, which the Conservative Party is expected to win.
Conservative party leader David Cameron has promised a referendum on the treaty if it has not already been ratified by every other EU member state when he comes into power. UK citizens would most likely vote against the treaty.
The beginning of trouble?
Whatever the motivations behind current requests for opt-outs, the debate has brought the Charter of Fundamental Rights back into the public spotlight and may signal the first in a long line of awkward situations created by the document.
One senior legal Irish figure described the charter as being very poorly drafted, opening up a series of unexplained questions for the future such as how the document will interact with national constitutional law, a point noted by the Czech constitutional court last year.
Another is the failure of the authors to fully clarify between the "rights" and "principles" listed in the charter.
"The reality is that a lot of this was drafted by diplomats and politicians who loved the high-sounding phrases and who basked in what they thought reflected Jeffersonian-style glory, but without really understanding what they were doing," said the source.