The EU is committed to preserving the integrity of the Treaty.

The EU welcomes the Moscow Treaty which entered into force on 1 June 2003.

The Lisbon Treaty also succeeds in tackling another major weakness of the EU its ineffectiveness. By means of extensive reforms to the structure, operation, and decision making processes of EU institutions, the treaty enhances their effectiveness and enables greater dynamism.

The EU regrets that there are three countries, India, Israel and Pakistan, still outside the Treaty.

European and international supervision of nuclear material is made by the EU Commission and the IAEA (Euratom Treaty, INFCIRC 193).

The Lisbon Treaty envisages the EU as a highly outward looking entity on the international stage. But there are limits to what the EU can do, limits determined by the Union s inter governmental nature.

In that regard, the EU will continue its efforts to maintain the authority and integrity of the Treaty and calls on those States not yet parties to the NPT to join the treaty as non nuclear weapon States.

In 2001, Irish voters rejected the Nice Treaty, which threw the EU into a protracted period of crisis and introspection, which ended only with agreement on the so called Constitutional Treaty in 2005. Almost immediately, however, French and Dutch voters rejected that Treaty, bringing the negotiations back to square one.

The EU is good at circumventing treaty obligations in times of real crisis. There is no reason to expect this skillfulness to desert it this time around.

In this context the EU is deeply concerned that some non nuclear weapon States Parties to the Treaty do not always comply with their obligations regarding non proliferation.

The EU is fully committed to the Treaty on the Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and to the three mutually reinforcing pillars on which it is based.

In fact, as Prime Minister David Cameron recently explained, his government seeks to renegotiate the terms of its EU membership, and to hold a referendum on the outcome, which potentially would decide whether the UK remains an EU member. While the UK is entirely free to leave the EU, given that it is a treaty based union, the move carries serious risks.

Conscious of its obligations under Article IV of the Treaty, the EU is engaged in many technical cooperation programmes, which contribute to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy by all States Parties to the Treaty and in particular to the requirements of developing countries.

We believe, though, that the increased use of qualified majority voting by member governments embodied in the new treaty should also be applied to the ratification process itself. That way, if a small minority of EU governments prove unable to ratify the treaty, it would not be torpedoed the way that its predecessor, the Constitutional Treaty, was in 2005.

According to the Treaty Establishing the European Community, it is a shared goal of the EU member states to reduce unequal treatment of men and women and to promote gender equality.

As the European Union prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome later this month, the EU is widely perceived to be on its knees. European integration, is felt to have, somehow met its Waterloo in 2005, when Dutch and French referendums unexpectedly torpedoed the draft EU constitution.

Like it or not, the eurozone will have to act as the EU s avant garde, because the EU as a whole, with its 27 member states, will be neither willing nor able to accelerate political unification. Unfortunately, unanimous support for the necessary EU treaty changes simply could not be secured.

Maynooth, Ireland On October 2, Irish voters go to the polls for a second time to decide whether to adopt the European Union s Lisbon Treaty. The mood in EU capitals is one of nervousness as polling day looms, with the future of the EU in the hands of Ireland s unpredictable voters.

That seduction should begin this year, with an agenda that sets the process and timeframe for accession, to be followed by an EU Turkey Treaty that confirms the country s accession by 2020.

No British prime minister could consent to a treaty change to create a fiscal union without having to call a referendum at home, the outcome of which would force the UK to withdraw from the EU. And no EU leader in his or her right mind could have any interest in that.

The EU must continue to insist that Russia ratify it, stipulating that Russia is already bound by its terms. The EU should also negotiate a framework document in the context of the next Partnership and Cooperation Agreement negotiations in order to clarify the obligations contained in the Treaty, in particular its Transit Protocol.

The EU would invite non EU states to do likewise

Pending entry into force of the said Treaty, the EU calls on all States to declare and uphold a moratorium on the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.

Pending entry into force of the said treaty, the EU calls on all States to declare and uphold a moratorium on the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.

This upset the balance of the Franco German axis around which the EU as a whole had long turned. To avoid negative political consequences, Germany agreed to be underrepresented in weighted voting on EU matters an imbalance in its own right that was not substantially corrected until the Lisbon Treaty entered into effect in 2009.

So it has been clear for months that a legally binding basis for moving toward a European fiscal union, while indispensible, could only take place outside the framework of the Lisbon Treaty, namely on an intergovernmental basis and as an EU 17 or EU 17 , as has just happened. Moreover, alarmist talk of a split overlooks the reality that the EU and the monetary union have long been moving at different speeds.

The EU attaches special importance to the negotiation in the Conference on Disarmament of a treaty banning the production of fissile material for weapons purposes as a means to strengthen nuclear non proliferation and disarmament.

EU PROPOSAL

Meanwhile, doubts still surround the political and institutional machinery the EU will need to realize these and other ambitious goals. Sighs of relief greeted EU leaders mid year agreement on a Reform Treaty aimed at overhauling the Union s decision making mechanisms, but it is still uncertain whether the new pact will survive the ratification process in 27 countries.

The Lisbon Treaty was the compromise agreed by EU leaders in the aftermath of the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in popular referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005. Much negotiating blood has been spilled on the Treaty, and its rejection a second time by Irish voters would leave the Union unable to ratify and implement its provisions this would inevitably lead to policy paralysis and institutional decay.

It seems clear that a second rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by the Irish electorate would plunge the EU into a renewed crisis and threaten to derail the considerable gains in both democratic legitimacy and collective decision making capacity deriving from the new Treaty. Everything indicates that voters now look set to approve the Treaty. But nobody should take Irish voters for granted in the final days of the campaign.

Some values, long espoused by the Union, should be relatively easy to convey. A decade ago, with the Maastricht Treaty, EU members agreed to respect the history, culture, and traditions of all of their constituent peoples.

In addition to the EU access agreements that have been signed in recent years, a 1987 treaty between 16 Pacific island nations and the U.S. granted access to their EEZ to as many as 50 vessels.

For Prime Minister Brian Cowen s new government, the risk is that a No to the Lisbon Treaty would cripple his administration in its infancy. For the EU, Irish rejection of the Treaty would probably trigger a lengthy period of instability, and perhaps even an end to the European integration process as it is now constituted.

The EU continues to regard the Treaty on the Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as the cornerstone of the global non proliferation regime, the essential foundation for the pursuit of nuclear disarmament under Article VI of that Treaty and an important element in the further development of the applications of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

But a decision to purchase sovereign bonds would also need to build on and factor in the institutional specificities of the euro area, including the limits set by the EU Treaty. We take these limits very seriously.

Blair s EU disaster

Post EU Depression

EU European Union

As a result, every set of treaty amendments was the product of the type of untidy political haggling typical of intergovernmental decision making. Indeed, even under the Constitutional Treaty, all states know that their partners have the express right to withdraw if they should ever become sufficiently disenchanted or come to look upon the EU as a bad bargain.

What is needed is a new pan European treaty on collective security, signed either by individual countries or by NATO and the EU, as well as by Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Countries not included in any of the current security systems would be able to join in the treaty and receive multilateral guarantees.

Further to the report of the United Nations High Level Panel, the EU calls on those States which are not parties to the NPT to commit themselves to non proliferation and disarmament, to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and to give their support to negotiations for a Fissile Material Cut off Treaty (FMCT).

But, like financial regulation, nuclear regulation in the EU, even with its Euratom treaty, is still essentially national. And, given the deep disparities in nuclear power s importance for European economies, consensus on regulatory harmonization is hard to reach.

If public opinion polls are to be believed, on May 29 the French will reject the European Union s draft constitutional treaty. Because all EU member countries must ratify the constitution, a French Non will, in effect, kill it.

Together with the OHCHR Treaties and Commission Branch, since November 2003 the NI Unit has undertaken training workshops under the EU funded project Strengthening the implementation of human rights treaty recommendations through the enhancement of national protection mechanisms .