Correspondence on the Lisbon Treaty

While the Government continue to repeat that the Treaty of Lisbon is different in “form” from the Constitutional Treaty, it has now accepted in highly significant exchanges between the Lord President, Baroness Ashton, and Lord Blackwell that there are only a limited number of significant differences between the resulting texts.* The reality is:

1. Both the Constitutional Treaty and the Consolidated EU Treaties following Lisbon are in large part made up of the text of the existing EU Treaties.
2. The amendments added in to create the Post Lisbon Treaties are very largely the same amendments as were incorporated in the Constitutional Treaty, and most of the text is therefore the same.
3. While there are a few notable differences - for example additional wording in the FSJ protocol - these do not amount to such a significant change as to justify the claim that the two Treaties are fundamentally different.
4. Indeed the Government have notably failed to directly address or rebut Lord Blackwell's observation that there are 'only two articles from the Constitutional text that were  not reproduced in whole or in part in the Lisbon consolidated text' . They have not contradicted the statement because the analysis they have provided actually confirms that statement.
5. Against that background, the government's claims that the Constitutional Treaty was different because it 'replaced' the existing Treaties whereas the Lisbon Treaty 'amends' them is playing with words to create a meaningless distinction. What matters is the content of the final resulting Treaties - not that one was presented as a series of amendments whereas the other was presented as the consolidated text with the amendments included. The Constitutional text may have been reordered and consolidated into one document, but the content is almost identical to the new EU and TEU Treaties post Lisbon - and so too are the legal and constitutional consequences.

• Letter from Baroness Ashton to Lord Blackwell, 25 April 2008
• Statewatch analysis 5: EU Reform Treaty - by Professor Steve Peers (referenced in letter dated 25 April)
• Response from Lord Blackwell to Baroness Ashton, 8 May 2008
• Response from Baroness Ashton to Lord Blackwell, 30 May 2008

* The correspondence between Lord Blackwell and Baroness Ashton are a matter of public record, and can also be found at http://deposits.parliament.uk./