Speech of the Prime Minister of the CR Mirek Topolánek in the meeting with EU countries ambassadors in the CR held in Hrzansky Palace on July 11th

Ladies and gentlemen,

I invited you to this informal meeting because in the recent days and weeks which followed the meeting of the European Council in Brussels I faced many questions concerning the role of the Czech Republic in negotiations, level of satisfaction with the results of the Council meeting as well as my personal impressions and feelings from the meeting, and what consequences the results of the meeting might have for the future of European policy.

I supposed it would not be useless to meet with you and to discuss the mentioned issues.

Let me to make a short summary for the introduction, and then I would be pleased to answer your questions and to discuss the matters with you.

For us the European Council meeting ended in success, and the Czech Republic belongs to the countries which had made significant contribution to it.

We did not play a passive role as previous governments did, and we actively, constructively and positively effected the negotiations about EU institutional reform.

What was, in our opinion, the European Council meeting about? Did the question of European Constitution come back through “the back door” as many academics and, after all, even politicians claim? In the recent time there were three theses appearing in respect of the Council result assessment related to the character of a contractual document, impact of EU single legal personality as well as the fact that some of the original constitution attributes had been maintained substantive and altered only in a cosmetic way - in naming.

We consider the European Council result as success of the Czech diplomacy.

Thanks to intensive communication with German Presidency and other EU member states we managed to push our main requirements through still before the meeting itself. In the course of the Council meeting we could then devote ourselves entirely to the elaboration of the game. Playing the role of an intercessor we could help Angela Merkel to keep Poland at negotiating table so that Poland did not get into isolation. We contributed to generally acceptable consensus noticeably.

We had also sufficiently wide mandate to support many good proposals brought forward by other countries.

We have managed to meet following goals:

European Constitution – not only its wording but also as a concept itself – was “swept under the carpet”. In lieu thereof, the point will be of standard renegotiation and updating of existing Treaties together with the institutional reform. We consider the fact that instead of Constitution replacing all existing Treaties there is the proposal for a Reform Treaty, maintaining those Treaties in force and just updating them, the most principal outcome of the Council.

Today it is already clear to everybody in Europe that the EU Constitution was too ambitious project as we used to claim since the beginning. Our originally minority opinion has been accepted by the other EU member states. And thanks to our active diplomacy we managed to push it through even before the meeting of the Council.

Advocates of European federalism as Romano Prodi may feel disappointed that the EU had thrown away its “emotional potential” or European Parliament green faction leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit may consider the summit results as “depressive”. However, the Reform Treaty is the result of maximum possible rational logics and maximum possible compromise.

There was a great media fuss caused by a motion of France proposing to omit stipulations promoting free market economy from the Treaty. Nevertheless it is necessary to realize that the same stipulation promoting free market economy has been maintained in a protocol having the same legal force as the wording of the Treaty itself.

Proposed EU legal personality shall under no circumstances mean abolishment of sovereignty of the member states as some people claim. That is clearly demonstrated in the substitution of the Union Minister for Foreign Affairs by a new title of High Representative for the Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Although he/she will be a member of European Commission by virtue of his/her function, he/she will not have powers to create foreign policy actively. He/she shall only execute it in a form unanimously agreed between all representatives of the member states. So there will be the principle of external sovereignty of the member states and their right of veto maintained. The European Council shall continue to be the authority where the EU foreign policy will be determined.

We have reached implementation of our national priority, i.e. flexibility opening the possibility to transfer some of the legislative acts back to national levels if they do not comply with the principle of subsidiarity and proportionality.

We also view as success the fact that the voting system used in the Council will be modified only after 2014 and that its future arrangement is still open. (Enhanced openness is key feature for us). So, the present voting system under the Treaty of Nice will continue to apply which is more preferable for the Czech Republic than the system proposed in so called European Constitution. We have reached one of the main priorities of our government, namely not to allow deterioration of the Czech Republic´s position and weakening the weight of its vote. Jagello compromise, i.e. the voting according to square root of population, is still the most fair and most democratic voting system for the EU as independent specialists claim. (In respect of system openness we would like to manifest that Jagello is not out of the game, yet.)

We were successful in supporting the enhancement of the role of national parliaments proposed by Netherlands. So called “orange card plus” means that the period given to national parliaments to examine legislative texts and to give their reasoned opinion will be extended from 6 to 8 weeks. If they consider the draft legislative act not complying with the principle of subsidiarity, the Commission will be bound to re-examine the draft, or the legislative proposal shall not be given further consideration at all, which was impossible in the past. (Simple majority of the votes allocated to national parliaments support the re-examination, not one third as the original proposal was).

Together with other countries we insisted on maintaining the Charter of Fundamental Rights apart from the institutional reform. There will be only references to the Charter in the wording which will prevent double-track attitude to human rights in the frame of European law. The EU will not be entitled to issue binding legislative acts on the grounds of the Charter. The Charter of Fundamental Rights shall not have the character of paramount act in respect of national constitutions of the member states, and nothing will change in the existing powers and jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. If the European Court of Justice wanted to interfere in the constitutional arrangement of member states in a more significant way under the authority of Union fundamental rights, it would anyway depend on the highest judicial and legislative bodies of the country concerned to what extend they would tolerate such possible interventions.

For the sake of achieving agreement and upon thorough consideration of our coalition mandate we went back on our requirement that no country should obtain an exclusive and permanent exception from the Community law. Due to differences between continental and British law we have admitted the exception for the United Kingdom in this area. We do not consider it as political concession but as the possibility to show our respect for specific Common law system applied the United Kingdom. If fact it is only a formal matter as we have managed that the Charter of Fundamental Rights will not change the existing system of human rights in the EU which has already been implemented in our legal system.

That is all from my side at this moment. Thank you for your attention. I am looking forward to our discussion.