WHY A ’CONVENTION’?
As the historic enlargement of the EU to Central and Eastern Europe approached it became clear the need to reform the European Union and its Treaties in order to prepare for a Europe of 25 rather than 15 countries. In addition there was strong pressure to make the EU more democratic, transparent, and efficient. The time had come for a profound debate on the objectives and goals of the EU, its Treaties and its institutions.
In the Laeken Summit, 14-15 November 2001, Laeken (Belgium) EU leaders issued the so-called "Laeken Declaration" where they created the concept of a Convention, setting out its membership, the structure and style of debate, the timeframe (starting on 28 February) and how civil society could participate. The Convention would hold a debate on those important issues and present its conclusions to the EU leaders by mid 2003.
WHO WAS IN THE CONVENTION?
French former President Giscard d’Estaing was nominated as Chairman of the future EU Convention., assisted by two vice-chairmen, Jean-Luc Dehaene, former Belgian Prime Minister and Giuliano Amato, the former Italian premier.
It was decided that the Convention would be composed of 15 representatives of the Heads of State or Government of the Member States (one from each Member State), 30 members of national parliaments (two from each Member State), 16 members of the European Parliament and two Commission representatives. The accession countries would be represented in the same manner as the current Member States (one government representative and two national parliament members) but would be unable to block any consensus which might emerge from existing Member States.
The Presidium of the Convention had job of coordinating the activity of the Convention, and its members were elected from among the Convention members.
It is worth remembering that some members of the Convention were replaced. Towards the end of 2002 many Member States realised the importance of the Convention and upgraded their Convention member to their Foreign Ministers.
WHAT DID THE CONVENTION DO?
In the first months of the Convention, the Plenary identified the issues that needed to be addressed and created 11 working groups that would analyse each issue and the possibilities of reform. This was called the ’listening phase’. After most working groups had published their conclusions, the Presidium started drafting a detailed text of the treaty. This was quite a surprise to the Member States who had limited the Convention’s mandate to more general remarks on the problematic issues of the EU. The draft ’Constitutional Treaty’ included some, but not all, of the recommendations made by the Working Groups.
In practice, there was three kind of meetings: Presidium meetings (usually the day before a plenary meeting), plenary meetings (open to the public) and ’component’ meetings (closed groups of the government representatives, national parliament representatives, European Parliament representatives, etc). The minutes of the Plenary meetings were made public and published in the internet, together with all the documents of the Convention in all EU official languages. Most of the minutes of the Presidium meetings will be made available later, as a result of a complaint brought before the European Ombudsman championing the citizen’s right of access to information..
The Presidium issued draft texts and the Convention members presented writen amendments. In the plenary they debated which changes should be made to the draft text, and reached an agreement by consensus. Then, the Presidium would issue a second text with the amendments that were broadly supported (although this theory was not always the result in practice).
Convention members could sign up before the plenary meeting to have a speaking slot (usually, 2 minutes) or could raise a blue card during the plenary if they wanted to make a remark about an issue already brought up by someone else (usually, 1 minute). The speeches were usually prepared beforehand, but the blue card intervetions were lively and spontaneous. Speeches corresponded to written amendments most of the time, and were delivered to remind the Presidium of the importance of including them in the text.
A Youth Convention was set up to find out what young europeans wanted to include in the Constitutional Treaty, the Youth Convention presented its conclusions to the Plenary after its session on the 9-12 July 2002. It has also been following the developments of the Convention and issuing reactions to the Convention work.
