Czech President Vaclav Klaus agrees with his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski that there is no reason to ratify the Lisbon treaty after its defeat in Ireland’s referendum.
It is “pointless” to ratify the agreement after it was rejected in the referendum in June, Kaczynski said in an interview published by the newspaper Dziennik yesterday.
Mr Klaus finds Mr Kaczynski's opinion “very reasonable and close to his own,” his spokesman Radim Ochvat said in a statement.
Mr Klaus believes that at this point, it is “impossible” to pursue the ratification of the treaty, which aims to streamline decision-making after the EU's recent expansion to 27 members.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country took over the six-month EU rotating presidency yesterday, and the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk have pressed the Polish president to back the treaty, which has been ratified by 19 EU members.
The Czech government has said it will resume the ratification process if the Constitutional Court rules later this year that the document complies with Czech law.
It's unclear, though, whether Mr Klaus is bound by the constitution to clear the treaty if it is passed by parliament, or he can opt not to do so. If the president “empowered the government to sign the treaty, then by that logic it should be inferred that he should also ratify it,” Vaclav Pavlicek, a constitutional law professor at the Charles University in Prague, said.
“However, the Czech constitution gives him certain possibilities to act in a different way”.
Bloomberg