Treaty of Nice: Articles

The Treaty of Nice introduced some important innovations, opening the door for possibly far-reaching reforms: the introduction of specialized courts, the reallocation of jurisdiction between the Court of Justice and Court of First Instance in direct actions, and the possibility to confer upon the Court of First Instance jurisdiction to give preliminary rulings in certain types of cases.

In December 2000, the European heads of government, meeting in Nice, took several momentous steps in the constitutional development of the European Union ("E.U."). Chief among them was the creation of a Charter of Fundamental Rights, a strikingly broad catalogue of individual rights and freedoms drawn from both the civil and political, and economic and social rights traditions.

The purpose of this article is to examine the changes that will be brought about once the Treaty of Nice1 is ratified and to speculate
on the likely impact of these new provisions, as well as to suggest some areas where further reform may still be necessary.

The Eastern enlargement of the EU is a project with huge political and economic chances. In spite of these chances, the success of the enlargement process is by no means certain as can be seen from the difficult accession negotiations.

The European Union has worked incessantly to achieve its goal of establishing a more unified European continent. The Treaty of Nice is the third major treaty revision of the EU in the past ten years

This paper presents an initial response to the conclusions of the Nice Summit and the new EU Treaty which emerged from it.

Analysing the Treaty of Nice from a dynamic perspective we observe that the major decisions on institutions and procedures are part of an historical evolution of the EU's ‘legal constitution’; in quantitative terms the Nice results extended fundamental trends of the European process over the last 50 years.

The provisions of the Treaty of Nice on enhanced cooperation, although not yet in force at this point, represent the latest development in the formalization of differentiated integration.

Triple majority for changing the status quo in Treaty of Nice (2001): qualified majority of weighted votes, majority of countries, qualified majority of the population. Convention proposal (2003): requirements from three to two by dropping the qualified majority of weighted votes and reducing the qualified majority threshold of the population from 62% to 60%.

The Treaty of Nice is principally about institutional design: the composition, size, mode of appointment and functioning of the institutions, including the voting rules which govern the adoption of their decisions, of the European Community and, hence of the European Union.

The debate lasted for more than fifty years, but with the entry into force of the Treaty of Nice on 1 February 2003,'Europe'finally succeeded in establishing its own security and defence policy–at least in a procedural sense.

Systematic evidence from the IGCs of 2000 and of 2003–04 confirms the explanatory power of the article’s argument. As a result of largely ineffective preparation and mediation during the IGC of 2000, the Treaty of Nice (2001) could not (or only provisionally) resolve many of the issues that had led to the convocation of the negotiations.

This study examines whether the Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon treaties have successfully increased the speed with which the EU creates new laws.