British Prime Minister Gordon Brown signed the European Union’s reform treaty in Lisbon on Thursday, hours after his fellow European leaders inked the text at a ceremony he missed, an Agence France-Presse photographer witnessed.
Brown, who attended a parliamentary committee hearing in London in the morning, arrived too late for the official lunch. Britain was represented at the signing ceremony by Foreign Secretary David Miliband.
He eventually signed the ”Treaty of Lisbon” in the presence of Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates and EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso, after most of his fellow leaders had left the lunch venue.
The British premier’s failure to attend the official ceremony — a week after boycotting an EU-Africa summit — led to accusations in Britain and Lisbon of a lukewarm attitude to Europe.
”We’ve all got problems to deal with. I personally think that we need Britain in Europe,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters after signing at the Jeronimos Monastery.
”We need Gordon,” he added in English, after Miliband had signed the treaty for his government, while the other 26 nations were represented by heads of state or government plus foreign ministers.
”There is no better manifestation of his lack of interest in Europe than his thinking that missing the signature would not be a big deal,” said Hugo Brady, of the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think tank.
Brown rejected the charges in comments published on Thursday. ”I think you’ll find on the debate about global Europe, we are leading the way,” he said in the Times newspaper.
At the official ceremony, in a historic Lisbon monastery, Socrates insisted that the treaty — which replaces a draft EU constitution scuppered by French and Dutch referendums in 2005 — poses no threat to the national sovereignty of member states.
”The European project does not eliminate nor minimise national identities,” he said. ”It offers a multilateral framework of regulation from which benefits can be drawn for the whole and for each of the parts that participate in the project.”
The treaty must yet be ratified in each EU member state before it can come into effect, as planned, in 2009.
Only Ireland is constitutionally bound to hold the kind of national referendum that doomed the constitution in 2005 and sparked the EU’s worst crisis to date.
Like the rejected constitution, the reform treaty proposes a European foreign-policy supremo and a permanent president to replace the cumbersome six-month rotating presidency system.
It cuts the size of the European Parliament and the number of EU decisions that require unanimous support, hence reducing national vetoes.
It also includes a European charter of fundamental human and legal rights, which Britain and Poland have refused to make binding.
Brown is due, on time, for his first Brussels EU summit on Friday. — Sapa-AFP