European Constitution/Treaty swindle - a comparison

http://www.openeurope.org.uk/media-centre/pressrelease.aspx?pressreleaseid=53

Open Europe publishes first comparative text of the new constitutional treaty – it’s exactly the same length as the constitution

16 August 2007

New “guide to the constitutional treaty” published

Open Europe today publishes the first comparative text of the new constitutional treaty, and a new guide to what it means.

The official version of the treaty is almost unreadable as it takes the form of a series of amendments to the existing treaties, without reproducing the existing text which they will alter. In other words, the new version contains only the “active ingredients” – the changes which were proposed by the original Constitution. This is intended to make it unreadable.

Open Europe is now publishing a consolidated text which shows how it would change the treaties. We also reproduce the text of the original version of the original Constitution alongside this. As you can see, the new treaty alters the existing treaties to bring them into line with the rejected European Constitution.

Some opponents of a referendum have argued that the “new” treaty is shorter than the old Constitution and so therefore cannot be substantively the same thing. This is a dishonest argument.

Once it is turned back into a consolidated text it becomes obvious that the “new” treaty essentially edits the existing treaties in such a way as to make them almost identical to the rejected Constitution. In fact the final product is the same length as the original version of the Constitution:

* The current treaties are approximately 54,000 words long

* The original EU Constitution was 63,000 words long

* The new version is also 63,000 words long.

The comparative text can be downloaded at:

http://www.openeurope.org.uk/research/comparative.pdf

The guide to the constitutional treaty can be downloaded at:

http://www.openeurope.org.uk/research/guide.pdf

Several EU leaders have admitted that the new treaty has been made deliberately inaccessible:

# The author of the Constitution Valery Giscard d’Estaing has said that: “All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.”

# Former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato has said: “They decided that the document should be unreadable. If it is unreadable, it is not constitutional, that was the sort of perception... Should you succeed in understanding it at first sight there might be some reason for a referendum, because it would mean that there is something new.”

# Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht has said, "The aim of the Constitutional treaty was to be more readable; the aim of this treaty is to be unreadable… The Constitution aimed to be clear, whereas this treaty had to be unclear. It is a success.”






My comment:
This is how the EU bureaucrats want to avoid taking in to consideration results of referendums in France and Netherlands and strip all others citizens of European states which not voted yet this possibility to decide about their future. This is how the EU do democracy!