h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've actually read the treaty.

If/when the UK referendum rolls around, I'll be voting yes too.

The treaty does a lot of useful and necessary work in clarifying and, indeed, putting a cap upon the powers of the Community institutions.

Part II of the treaty - the Declaration of Fundamental Rights - is particularly important. The treaty, if ratified, will give the Community the competence to sign up to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Not everyone, of course, supports this 'declared rights' approach. Roger Scruton, for example, makes a case for the merits of uncodified but assertable rights through the Common Law:

"Rights are not secured by declaring them. They are secured by the procedures that protect them. These procedures must be rescued from the state… Rights define the limits of power, and these limits must be enforced by the citizen himself, through procedures of justice, rather than by the state, through some all comprehending and in the event all encompassing doctrine." (R Scruton, The State can’t set you free, The Spectator, London, 16 October 2004, p18-19)

I disagree with Professor Scrution - there is something sad in the fact that in 2005, I, a student at Aiberdeen University, can attend lectures at which Senior Lecturers must say “and therefore the state of the law now appears to be…” yet this is a consequence of the UK’s lack of a codified constitution.

Thus, today’s UK citizen has to look to Europe for some assertion and protection of constitutional Bill of Rights-type liberties through the European Convention on Human Rights, enacted into UK law through the Human Rights Act 1998 (and the Scotland Act 1998) , and the European Court of Human Rights. The proposed new European Constitution will enhance (and unify, around the European Convention of Human Rights) those rights.

It is easy to forget that in the conflict between the State and The Individual, that 'Europe' generally has mitigated in favour of the individual.

Douglas