Oct. 29 (Nouvelle Solidarité)—On his weekly webcast Oct.21, Jacques Cheminade, president of Solidarité & Progrès, fully supported the decision of the Polish tribunal to uphold the primacy of its own Constitution with respect to the EU Treaty. He showed that the French Constitution is on the same line, and called the EU attacks against Poland a “judicial putsch.”
On Oct. 7, said Cheminade, the Polish Constitutional Court ruled that two articles of the Treaty of the European Union violate the Polish Constitution insofar as they allow the nation’s Constitution to be set aside in favor of European law. The Polish court did not condemn the EU Treaty itself, but the principle that European law should have primacy over Poland’s national constitutional rules. The Polish court found that European law applies as a priority only in the predefined fields of jurisdiction. It is therefore the European Court of Justice that is encroaching and violating the law, using a European Court of Justice decision (Costa v ENEL) dating back to the times of the European Commission (1964), and not the Polish Supreme Court.
Cheminade went back to the crucial political and judicial decisions which have led France to uphold its Constitution over other legal texts, except when its leaders have gone into a “voluntary submission” to foreign dictates, which has tended to be the case in recent years.
The speech on the founding Treaty of Rome by former head of government Pierre Mendès France on Jan. 18, 1957, expresses the philosophy well: “The abdication of a democracy can take two forms: either the recourse to an internal dictatorship, by the handing over of all powers to a providential man; or the delegation of its powers to an external authority which, in the name of technique, will exercise the political power because in the name of a healthy economy one easily comes to dictate a monetary, budgetary and social policy, finally a policy that one dictates to us, national and international. If France is ready to carry out its recovery within the framework of a fraternal cooperation with the other European countries, it will not admit that the ways and means of its recovery are imposed from outside, even under the cover of automatic mechanisms.”
For these reasons, Article 54 of the French Constitution specifies that if France signs a treaty whose provisions go against the Constitution, the Constitution must be amended before the Treaty can be applied. Article 55 then becomes problematic insofar as it states that “treaties and agreements regularly ratified or approved, have, from the moment they are published, a superior authority to that of laws, on condition, for each agreement and treaty, that it is also applied by the other party.” However, it was overruled by a decision of France’s State Council (the highest judicial authority on administrative matters) of Oct. 30, 1998, which states that “the supremacy conferred by Article 55 of our Constitution to the international commitments does not apply in the internal order to provisions of a Constitutional nature.” This decision, taken in the context of a ruling concerning New Caledonia (Sarran-Levasseur) was then upheld by the Council of State and by the Supreme Court, and it’s considered as one of the major decisions of our times on matters of hierarchy or norms.
Finally, beyond all these arguments, which are valid in courts, there is Article 2 of the French Constitution upholding the “government of the people, for the people, and by the people,” which overrules everything else.
