The Danish Supreme Court on Tuesday (11 January) ruled admissible a complaint filed by 28 citizens who are trying to sue Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen for having adopted the Lisbon Treaty without a referendum.
In a surprising ruling, the country’s top constitutional judges allowed the plaintiffs to pursue their case against Mr Rasmussen for breach of the constitution. The Supreme Court found that the 28 plaintiffs have a “requisite legal interest in having their claims verified.”
The group of professors, actors, writers and euro-sceptic politicians mounting the constitutional challenge argues that the Lisbon Treaty does indeed hand over parts of national sovereignty to Brussels and therefore a referendum should have taken place.
It is unclear what would happen if they win. The plaintiffs have far-fetched hopes it could lead to the undoing of the treaty itself, but in any case the PM would not face any personal repercussions.
The constitutional challenge is not a first: in 1996, a similar case was brought to the court by a group of citizens claiming the Maastricht Treaty was in breach of the Danish constitution. The government tried to block the case, but it was accepted by the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs, however, lost the case in the end, but won certain amendments similar to the German Constitutional Court.
“It is unlikely that the Supreme Court will find the whole treaty in breach of the Danish Constitution, but just like in the German case, they will probably ask for some provisions in the way it’s implemented,” Danish MEP Soren Bo Sondergaard from the People’s Movement against the EU told this website.
The pending case may however complicate the ratification of a further treaty change, concerning the establishment of a permanent EU bailout mechanism, the Danish MEP speculates. It could also block efforts by the current government to hold a referendum on scrapping the Danish opt-outs from the EU treaties: on accession to the eurozone, on participation in the common defence policy and on justice and home affairs co-operation.
