The Lisbon Treaty

What is the Lisbon Treaty?

It is an international agreement agreed by all 27 countries of the European Union (EU) after years of development, debate and delay. It is effectively a constitution, or set of rules about how the EU will work. The whole reason for developing this treaty was to try to make the Union work more efficiently. It was working on principles that were developed for a much smaller EU of 15 countries and it has been argued that many aspects needed to change to reflect the enlargement of the Union to 27 countries.

It became law on 1 December 2009, but many of the changes will not come in for a few years yet.

So what are the main changes?

There is an enormous amount of information in this new treaty and some of the main changes include:

· The European Council has become an official EU institution. They are the prime ministers and/or presidents of the 27 member states who currently meet up to 4 times a year at special summit meetings to set overall EU policy and the chair currently rotates amongst the member states every 6 months. Under the Lisbon Treaty, a President of the European Council has been appointed (Herbert van Rompuy) by majority vote of the Council and will serve in the post for 2 and a half years (renewable once). Part of the role will be to represent Europe on the world stage.

· A new post of High Representative (of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) has been created (Cathy Ashton). This is a kind of "EU foreign minister" role. Candidates will have to be nominated by the governments of the members states and will be appointed by the European Council.

· There will be a reduction in the number of European Commissioners which will mean there will no longer be one Commissioner from each member state. This change will not happen before 2014 though.

· The number of MEPs will change and be fixed at 751. This is due to a change in the maximum and minimum numbers of MEPs that will be allowed from each member state. This change won’t happen until the next European elections are held in 2013.

· The European Parliament (made up of MEPs who represent the citizens of EU countries) will have greater powers in the co-decision process of approving legislation and the budget, as the process is extended to new areas of policy.

The Lisbon Treaty is a long document containing lots of information and we have only mentioned a few of the issues here. To find out more, click here.