ECJ to decide on new HQ ECB?

The European Central Bank is planning to construct its new premises on the former Großmarkthalle (pictured above) site in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It is now temporarily based in Frankfurt's Eurotower. As is well known, the location of European Central Bank was fixed by the Amsterdam Treaty along with other major institutions.

However, the descendants of the original architect of the Großmarkthalle have brought legal proceedings before Frankfurt’s district court to prevent the market being rebuilt in the way the architect of the new HQ intends, claiming breach of copyright on the original layout of the building. Forbes now reports that the district court has suspended this case until the ECJ decides whether the district Court or the ECJ itself is competent.

Rules of Procedure Civil Service Tribunal

The Rules of Procedure of the Civil Service Tribunal, which I wrote about in this post, have been published in the OJ.

link (pdf)

Poland wants Polish AG

Polish Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga said yesterday that Poland will try to reform the European Court of Justice so that it gets its own Advocate General.

The ECJ currently has eight Advocates-general, five of which are normally drawn from the EU's 'big five' states Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain, with the other three posts rotating between the other member states.

Poland wants this number to increase as well as one of the advocates to be Polish.

Anna Fotyga, a former MEP, said that these proposals can count on support from the other New Member States.

Jim Murphy on the Reform Treaty

Here is a link to the transcript of an interesting BBC interview with the UK Minister of State for Europe, Jim Murphy, on the Reform Treaty. Just an extract:

JIM MURPHY:
... what's very clear every member state has said that the constitutional approach has been abandoned. There will be no European Union constitution. That's now no longer on the table at all.

INTERVIEWER:
Well that's a highly disputed point as you know and isn't the truth behind all of this that you are scared to hold a referendum because you believe that you would lose, therefore scuppering the new treaty altogether?

JIM MURPHY:
Martha, it's not a highly disputed point at all. The fact is that every member state has agreed that the constitutional approach has been abandoned. They have all signed up to that very clearly and this treaty is a similar nature to the four previous treaties signed by three previous prime ministers - Prime Ministers Thatcher, Major and Blair.

INTERVIEWER:

But just one person who would dispute the difference of the constitution is Gisela Stuart, Labour MP, always been very loyal to the government until this point. She was one of the people who negotiated the original constitution. She says they're extremely similar, as does Giscard D'Estaing, as the Irish Foreign Minister, the Spanish Foreign Minister. You know the list goes on.

JIM MURPHY:

The list goes on of course, Martha, because what happened is that the UK has signed up to a specific unique UK version of the treaty, not only the issue of the protocol that we've spoken about already but the automatic opt-out on new proposals on our criminal justice system, justice and home affairs. So we have decided that we would wish to have a UK-specific version of the new treaty. Other countries of course, and France, Germany, Ireland, will do their own thing in their own way but we're in the business of looking after the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom's interest, but co-operating with Europe when it makes sense to do so and on things like security, the environment, economic liberalisation, of course it does and will continue to do so.

...

Analysis Reform Treaty

Steve Peers sent me this link to his very thorough analysis of the draft Reform Treaty - showing exactly how it would amend each provision of the TEC or TEU, with annotations as to the meaning of each change and comparisons between the Reform Treaty and the Constitutional Treaty.

Highly recommended!