Why vote yes to Lisbon? Over the past few weeks, we have been bombarded with arguments from both sides on the great referendum debate. These have often descended into point-scoring, name-calling and manipulation of the Treaty itself. Leaving aside all that, I believe that there are four simple reasons to vote yes on 2nd October. These are: stronger human rights protection; greater democracy in EU decision-making; more efficiency in an enlarged Union; and finally, increased financial security.
I am most passionate about the first reason. If passed, the Lisbon Treaty would make the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding. This Charter sets out a wide range of human rights, including the right to liberty, to privacy, and to freedom of thought. Article 21 of the Charter bans discrimination on a range of grounds, specifically including sexual orientation. As a lawyer who works with the fundamental rights provisions of the Irish Constitution in our own courts, I am very excited about the prospect of using this Charter to increase the human rights protections of our citizens. I believe that it could be used to enhance the rights of women, of gay people, of ethnic minorities, of people with disabilities and of other disadvantaged groups. It goes further than our own Constitution in guaranteeing rights of workers, such as the right to engage in collective bargaining and the right to fair working conditions. It even includes socio-economic guarantees like the right to social security, and to healthcare. Not all the rights it guarantees can be exercised yet, and many sections are still only aspirational; but there is a great deal of scope for future development. Not only that, but the Lisbon Treaty also allows the EU to sign up to the European Convention on Human Rights. The Convention has already been very effective in protecting human rights in specific cases, like that taken to the European Court of Human Rights against Ireland by David Norris in the 1980s, which led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality here.
Apart from the increased human rights protection the Treaty would provide, it would also create greater democracy in EU decision-making. Lisbon gives the European Parliament a stronger role in making European legislation; it provides for greater scrutiny of draft EU laws by national parliaments; and for the first time it allows citizens to invite the Commission to take up particular issues, through the right to petition in the new citizens’ initiative, which can be activated by one million EU citizens. More exciting possibilities there.
A third critical factor is that Lisbon would make the Union work more efficiently, by making key structural changes to enable more states to join in future. Personally, I would love to see the Union expand to include countries like Croatia, the Balkan states, and former Soviet republics like Georgia and Ukraine. This would present extraordinary opportunities for greater peace, progress and prosperity for many deeply disadvantaged peoples living in poverty just beyond the European borders.
Finally, it is in our own self-interest to vote yes. We face a massive financial crisis, with soaring unemployment and a horrifying level of national debt - which will be worsened if NAMA is passed. The joke going around among international bankers was that Ireland and Iceland were only different by one letter and a few months. But, critically for us, there was another major difference. Ireland is within the EU Euro zone, and thus we have much greater financial security than any isolated state, with the backing of the European Central Bank. To put it bluntly, the EU cannot afford to have a member of the Eurozone go bankrupt; the ECB would bail us out before the IMF ever got called in. But we need the continued goodwill of our fellow Member States to ensure our own economic security; and we risk losing that with a ‘No’ vote.
Many of those opposing the Treaty have argued that the EU favours the free market too strongly. Yet in each member state, including Ireland, the excesses of the free market have been significantly curbed over many decades by EU laws; on the environment, on gender equality, and on workers’ rights, for example. Adoption of the Lisbon Treaty and the Charter would enable development of greater social and human rights protections for citizens – and would move us towards the left-wing vision of a ‘social Europe’. For that reason alone, I believe that it’s worth voting yes.
