The untouchable European Union

Roberta Metsola Tedesco Triccas in her letter to The Times (April 28) writes that "the whole process leading to the Constitution for Europe, a process that can be referred to as the biggest effort to bring all said rules in one document which is easy to read and therefore understand, failed." She adds that: "The Constitution was therefore scrapped and another project launched: the Lisbon Treaty."

French and Dutch voters voted against the Constitution in referenda because, as Ms Triccas aptly claims, "they believed the message churned out by the no camps that too much power was going to shift from national governments to the European institutions in Brussels".

And rightly so; what Dr Tedesco Triccas did not say was that the Lisbon Treaty is just a change of packaging for the very same rejected Constitution and that in fact it is not at all understandable to citizens.

To quote one famous European statesman: "The content of the new Treaty is the same as in the rejected Constitution, but the format has changed from a legible Constitution to two sets of incomprehensible Treaty amendments." (Valery Giscard d'Estaing, former French President).

What she did not say was that the rehashed Constitution in its metamorphosed form as a Treaty was not put to the test at a second referendum in those same countries (France and Holland) where it had already been rejected.

What Dr Tedesco Triccas also did not say was that the final text of the Lisbon Treaty is not at all readable and understandable and is made up of approximately 300 pages of amendments that cannot be understood on their own without constant referral to the underlying 2,800 text of previous treaties. She also failed to say that the EU failed to publish a manageable consolidated version of the Treaty.

To quote another European statesman: "The Constitution has deliberately been made illegible for citizens, precisely in order to avoid referendums." (Giuliano Amato, former Italian PM and chairman of the Convention set up to draft the Constitution - euobserver.com July 16, 2007).

Dr Tedesco Triccas also did not write that the Treaty very cunningly avoids the word Constitution in its text, but in substance it is nothing short of a Constitution that has been formatted in such as way as to be unintelligible apparently even to those, as our own Members of Parliament, who approved it.

Libertas, the pan European party, is against the Lisbon Treaty because contrary to what Dr Tedesco Triccas suggests, it renders the EU less transparent and less democratic, pushing the EU and its institutions even further away from the reach of the common citizen.

Libertas is in favour of an EU that works better for its citizens and not one that stands on an untouchable and unaccountable platform.