Red Line threatened on Justice

The following is taken from an item from 'Open Europe': Commons Committee: UK red line on criminal justice further weakened in new draft Most papers report on Gordon Brown’s comments yesterday, made at a joint press conference with Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, apparently threatening to veto any treaty that did not guarantee UK ‘red lines’. He said, "I believe we have succeeded in our negotiating objectives. If we were not to achieve our red lines, we could not accept the amending treaty." However, the Commons European Scrutiny Committee questioned whether the UK red lines offered any real safeguard, arguing in a letter to David Miliband that the UK could be corralled into accepting EU control over criminal justice. The Committee said that the latest legal draft suggested the UK could only remain outside the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice for five years on justice and home affairs issues, and after that might face serious consequences if it decided not to accept ECJ jurisdiction. The Committee also warned that if the UK did not accept the jurisdiction, all EU measures adopted so far would cease to apply, and Britain would risk incurring "a potentially unlimited financial responsibility". At present Britain can choose to opt in to justice and home affairs issues, such as the European Arrest Warrant, but is not required to accept ECJ jurisdiction. "If we have understood the position correctly, the amendment to the Protocol and the Declaration could well have the effect of persuading the UK to opt in for fear of unpredictable consequences if it did not," Committee Chair Michael Connarty wrote. The FT’s Political Editor George Parker argues that Brown’s stance on the EU Treaty is “spin in its most juvenile form”. He goes on to say “I recently returned from a five-year stint as the FT’s Brussels bureau chief, and I can confirm that the new Treaty is – essentially – the same as the Constitution upon which the government did promise a referendum.” Simon Carr argues in the Independent, “The European Scrutiny Committee has identified serious weaknesses in the Government's position on this treaty. The committee, is, as it were, dealing with the treaty's language, not the linguistics, the spinnables. They lay out precisely how the red lines will be chewed up over time, bite by bite in the European Court of Justice. No one in Downing Street has asked the committee's chairman for a briefing, or advice or even a gloss on its report. They should. At least they'd weasel with more authority.” Michael White argues in the Guardian that the Committee “has spotted that Mr Blair's ‘opt-in’ option to pick and choose what bits of the justice and home affairs (JHA) agenda to embrace may only be good for five years. After that, it would be all JHA or nothing. Britain could lose a lot of cooperation on terrorism and crime - a growing EU concern - including extradition of terror suspects, where our own record is spotty.” A leader in the Sun argues that Brown must respond to the drop in the polls by calling a referendum on the revised EU Constitution.