The Ruling of the German Constitutional Court on the Treaty of Lisbon

Extract

Generations of politicians and lawyers will have to read and re-read the recent ruling of the German Constitutional Court of 30 June 2009 regarding the Treaty of Lisbon (“Lisbon Case”) on almost a daily basis for many years to come. The Court, master of its own proceedings and not feeling bound by any doctrine of judicial self-restraint, has expounded in this decision at great length about its own philosophy of the European integration process. Based on its self-established theory, in which every German citizen is holder of a democratic right to a legislature that is endowed with substantial powers to determine the destiny of the German people, the Court examined the Treaty in each and every detail. The claimants, alleging through a constitutional complaint that this democratic right had been breached, could not point to any specific injury that they had suffered. In real terms, their constitutional complaints amounted to an ‘abstract' review of the Treaty, a remedy which the Basic Law reserves for the federal government, any government of a Land, or for a third of the members of the Bundestag. But the Court saw the constitutional complaints, which had been filed by the extreme right and the extreme left of the political spectrum, as a welcome opportunity to define the constitutional limits of the European integration process. Far from reflecting the views of the framers, the ruling reads like a political manifesto from the judges.