A new draft of the EU treaties which radically consolidates and simplifies some 700 articles in a multiplicity of treaties into a "Basic Treaty" of 95 articles, two special protocols and a recasting of the Treaty of Rome has been prepared for the European Commission by the European University Institute in Florence.
The project, undertaken at the request of the Commission in January, aims to produce a text which is accessible to citizens while preserving the substance of all existing EU treaty law, a challenge which Prof Yves Meny, the group's chairman, claims they have achieved.
Also due to be elaborated by the Florence legal team, which includes an Irishwoman, Prof Grainne de Burca, are proposals to simplify future treaty changes by treating amendments to "core" aspects of the treaty differently from "implementation" aspects. These will be dealt with in a separate report.
Welcoming the draft yesterday, the Commissioner for Institutional Affairs, Mr Michel Barnier, said it had yet to be studied in detail by the Commission.
However, he said, both he and the Commission President, Mr Romano Prodi, hoped that the EU Nice summit in December would ask for their work on simplification and consolidation of the treaties to be taken forward.
Mr Barnier accepted that would mean that the current Inter-Governmental Conference on treaty reform of the institutions, due to conclude in December, would have to be followed by another on a broader agenda.
Meanwhile, Mr Prodi has welcomed last Friday's speech by the German Foreign Minister, Mr Joschka Fischer, in which he made a controversial case for federalising the structures of the EU.
Mr Prodi's spokesman would not be drawn on the detail of Mr Fischer's proposals but said that he had "shown a number of very important ways forward".
During the Amsterdam Treaty negotiations suggestions that a radical simplification of the EU treaties should be undertaken were dropped because of lawyers' fears that any rewriting of treaties would inevitably reopen hardfought, but settled, arguments and would also threaten to dilute what is known as the acquis communautaire, the entire corpus of rights, duties and procedures agreed over the years.
New treaty language, some argued, could also upset the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice. There was no practical alternative to accepting the ramshackle European treaty architecture as it stood, they said.
The draft treaties can be consulted at: http://europa.eu.int/igc2000
