VERBATIM REPORT OF SPEECH BY DANIEL HANNAN MEP TO THE FOURTH CONGRESS FOR DEMOCRACY, 14 July 2000

THE NEXT INTER-GOVERNMENTAL CONFERENCES

What I want to flag up today is the new political agenda taking place as part of the Inter-Governmental process which is due to culminate in Nice early in December. Let me try and put it like this. Imagine that you were a committed European federalist. What would you want? What would be the main objectives to be incorporated in the next Treaty? After all, the EU has equipped itself, as we know, with many of the trappings and attributes of statehood - its own Parliament, its own currency, its own foreign service, its own external borders and so on. Where are the gaps that you would feel most strongly about and want to fill?

There are really four main things which supporters of a federal Europe are pushing for and which are on the agenda in the run up to Nice. One is the harmonisation or integration of defence, leading ultimately to a European military force. The second - and I think this is one that has not been analysed as much as it deserves - is the process of harmonising juridical process and policing, and the creation of some sort of European criminal code. The third is to have a written constitution, that final and definitive attribute of statehood: a written constitution for the EU. And then, resting on that, the fourth is to have a proper functioning European political system based on trans-national, pan-European political parties.

All of these things to a greater or lesser extent are in the draft treaty. People are not aware of quite how far this IGC process has gone. Since January of this year there has actually been a draft treaty with over articles 180 articles. It was brought out by the Commission, excitingly titled Commission Opinion in Accordance with Article 48 of the Treaty on European Union on the Calling of the Conference of Representatives of the Governments of the Member States to amend the Treaties. (One realises after a bit of time in Brussels that it is these exciting titles that tend to mask the really important work.) And here is a text which has now been commented on and amended by the European Parliament and which is beginning to grind through the process which will culminate on 6 December at a special summit in Nice. I will go through those four aspects of it in slightly more detail to fill you in on what the agenda is.

First of all, the army. What is being proposed is not the creation of some additional military resource available to the European Union. What is being tackled is the command structures of existing troops. None of the member governments in the EU has the appetite at a time like this to expand defence expenditure, so the focus is on the creation of politico-military structures in Brussels, Rather than having either an intergovernmental or a NATO-based approach to defence matters, there would be a direct input by the Commission and Council of Ministers who have at the Cologne summit assigned a specific national force called the Eurocorps. This had its first deployment a few months ago in Kosovo and is seen as the nucleus of a European army.

Now I would not want to overstress this. I do not believe that there is a plot afoot completely to scrap NATO and to create a new European force. I think most European federalists, with the exception of one or two of the French, still see some kind of NATO alliance as providing the bedrock of European security. What they want is the overseas peacekeeping deployment in high profile places, and that is something that is likely to be rubberstamped as part of the Nice treaty.

The second pillar - policing and the judiciary. This is referred to in coded language as "co-ordinating the fight against crime" or "cutting down on fraud", in much the same way as the Common European Army is referred to as "improving our defence" or "strengthening the European pillar of NATO". It is quite important to be clear about what is being done here. What is being proposed is not mutual recognition of judgements or co-ordination of juridical practice. That already happens both within the EU and around the world. We have remarkably sophisticated accords and treaties dealing with the fact that time spent in one prison can be counted as time off a sentence in another jurisdiction, guaranteeing translation in courts and so on - all of that is already there.

What is being proposed is something far more far-reaching and ambitious, which is the creation of a new criminal code for the EU. For the first time it would be possible to be arraigned in front of a court not because you have committed a crime under English or Scottish or French or Portuguese 1aw, but under a new criminal code. This is almost unprecedented - we do have the precedent of the Nuremberg trials but that is the only other example of where there has been a corpus of criminal law existing outside a nation state, not anchored in a democratic body with an accountable legislature.

I think that is a hugely worrying development. Of course the EU does not put it like that. They say it is only to do with one or two things such as fraud against the EU budget which has to be prosecuted at EU level because we cannot just do it in one member state. But they are quite clear about the fact that it is seen as a first step and that once they have in place a European Public Prosecutor and a European criminal law, it will expand to all other areas of cross-border crime such as terrorism, money-laundering, trafficking in drugs, etc. I think the best way I can describe this is that it is ultimately intended to evolve into a US-type system where you have federal laws and state laws at two tiers. I suspect that English and Scottish law would still retain jurisdiction over, for example, murder, as happens in the US, but most of the international and cross-border responsibilities would be gradually sucked up to EU level. When you have a European legal system you of course need a European police force to enforce it. Enter Europol, which up until now has been a pretty harmless organisation, a sort of clearing house for information, a regional branch of Interpol if you like. Under the Treaty of Nice, however, it is to be given executive power and the ability to interfere in policing activity so that at a stroke its personnel are transformed from diplomats into active policemen.

The third pillar, the constitution. Again, the EU is very clever about this. It does not call it a constitution, it calls it a Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms. Brilliant. Who could be against fundamental rights and freedoms? Anyone now who speaks out against this can be portrayed as someone who is against freedom of speech and freedom of worship and all the rest of it.

But I would like to step back and make one observation. Why is it that the EU needs an instrument in this field at all? Every member state of the EU is already bound by the UN's Universal Declaration on Human Rights, by the European Convention, by national legislation guaranteeing basic human rights and by a host of lesser international accords. Why does the EU need to muscle in on this territory?

The answer, which is an answer that is given quite freely on the continent but not here, is that once you have a guaranteed charter it becomes justiciable before the European Court of Justice and of course at that stage it ceases to become a Declaration and becomes a Constitution. This is the whole objective. It is not some side effect.

Let me approach it another way. Where is the monstrous violation of human rights currently taking place in western Europe that such a Charter would tackle? We are not dealing here with 15 Rwandas, we are dealing with fifteen advanced, mature democracies, all of which have sophisticated human rights legislation. Where is the need for this?

Of course what is really in peril at this time as we enter the 21^st century is not human rights but democracy, precisely because of instruments like this transferring further powers from elected accountable bodies to unaccountable institutions, be they bureaucrats or bankers or judges. And under this Charter of Fundamental Rights we will have a situation where European judges are empowered - or, more correctly, are obliged - to overrule democratic national legislation when they deem that it contravenes their principles. We are not far off the day when we have European judges telling us that we have a fundamental right, for instance, to a minimum wage at a particular level, or a fundamental right to abortion on demand. Whatever one thinks about those issues, surely they ought to be dealt with by democratically accountable politicians and not by judges whom nobody can elect.

And finally, the fourth great pillar of the forthcoming NiceTreaty, the creation of a political union and a functioning European polity. There are various aspects of this. The treaty aims to break the link between individual member states and the Commission by having a Commission as a kind of Cabinet or government rather than having each country nominating its own peopl. This would mean that a British Commissioner would be an appointee of the President rather than of the British government; he would no longer be our man in Brussels. Sustaining this government, as in any continental country, would be an elected legislature, namely the European Parliament.

To have this functioning as a proper pan-European legislature, it would have to have pan-European political parties. This is proposed in article 6 of the new treaty. And here's the real sting in the tail. Political parties which do not respect fundamental rights and freedoms as defined in the Treaty of Rome are to be made subject to suspension proceedings in the European Court of Justice.

Now I have thought long and hard before saying what I am about to say because I realise there is a danger of sounding a bit paranoid. It's one of those dreadful situations where if you analyse something coldly and accurately you do sound a bit mad but that's the comment I assure you on what I am talking about rather than on my reaction to it. This is designed explicitly to deprive funding and ultimately to deprive in some cases recognition from political parties which oppose the European project. I don't think that anyone is proposing that they be banned in their home countries, but that they would be banned from taking up seats in the European Parliament. That is made more or less explicit in a letter to Romano Prodi from the leaders of the four biggest groups in the European Parliament in which they set out a number of criteria for official recognition as a European party at Brussels level, including the fact that you have to have a common manifesto. Well, goodbye UK Independence Party, goodbye Conservative Party. We don't have a sufficient number of sister parties across the rest of the EU that we could agree a pro-European manifesto with them and this is more or less the overt intention.

It is a terribly frightening development. You don't need a huge amount of historical memory to recall that during the Stalinist period in eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, it was precisely by this mechanism that the Communist Party maintained its dictatorship. They did not ban elections - they had elections all the time - they simply banned what they defined as extremist or fascist parties and that soon came to apply to everyone except themselves and, in some cases, their allied agrarian parties.

Now I don't think that we are at that stage yet in the EU. But it is a terrifying thing that so few people are speaking out now against the principle of doing this, that that great European tradition, the whole Voltairean tradition of seeing the other man's point of view and fairness and freedom in democracy, counts for so little against this objective of building a European state.

How have we got into this? How is it that this government is now seriously contemplating signing up to a treaty that contains all these provisions? I would do them the courtesy of assuming that they are rational people who have some sense of wanting what is best for their country. How is it that our British government today is planning to sign all these things away quite separate from the single currency?

It seems to me that if you look very closely at what Ministers say they very rarely advance any kind of case from first principles as to why we would be better off transferring this or that power from Westminster to Brussels. What they do instead is create this sense of whether we like it or not we have to go along with it because we are too small to survive, all the others are doing it, we can't be isolated.

Too small to survive? We are the fourth biggest economy in the world. We are the fifth military power on the planet. We are one of five members of the UN Security Council, we are one of eight members of the Group of Eight industrialised countries, we have unparalleled links with the United States, the Commonwealth, the rest of the English-speaking world. How big do we have to be before we run our own affairs in our own interests?

The wealthiest country in Europe, the country with the richest citizens, the highest income per head, is Switzerland, followed by Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. None of these is even a member of the EU, let alone about to sign up for the Nice Treaty and join the euro. Do we really believe that if little Switzerland, relying on a normal bilateral free trade accord, is able to furnish her people with the highest standard of living in Europe, that a country the size of this one, with a people as entrepreneurial as ours, with our maritime commercial tradition, with our economy, with our prosperity, is not able to survive running its own affairs in its own interests?

And this, it seems to me, is our message going out from this Fourth Congress.

It is we on our side of the argument who have faith in the capacity of the UK to survive as an independent country, who have faith in the character of our people and their ability to thrive living under their own laws and under their own people. Because what we are talking about here is the maintenance of something which is so easily taken for granted: the right to kick governments out if we don't like their decisions.

We can sometimes use these old crusty phrases like sovereignty of parliament, but what sovereignty of parliament means in this country is sovereignty of the people - the right to choose the laws and measures under which we are governed. It is that central right which has made this country what it is and it is up to us in this Congress to hold that right fast so that our children can inherit the rights which we in our turn were privileged to inherit from our own parents.

ENDS