EU Ministers Press for Treaty Deal as Clock Ticks

VIANA DE CASTELO, Portugal - EU foreign ministers voiced optimism on Friday a deal could be clinched on a major reform treaty next month, despite a looming Polish election and pressure in Britain for a referendum.

European Union leaders agreed in June on a blueprint for the treaty to overhaul the enlarged 27-nation bloc's creaking institutions, replacing a more ambitious EU constitution that was rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005.

Legal experts have been working quietly to turn that mandate into a treaty against a backdrop of political crisis in Poland, which resisted the deal, and a campaign by Eurosceptics to force British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to put the text to voters.

EU president Portugal was confident the bloc's leaders would agree on the treaty at a summit on Oct. 18-19, despite new demands by Poland, whose conservative Eurosceptic cabinet has long sought to boost its clout in EU decision-making.

"We have a timetable and we are sticking to that ambition. We all agreed we should conclude at the upcoming summit in October," Portuguese Foreign Minister Luis Amada told a news conference after the first day of the ministers' talks.

"Everything we heard today comforts us in that expectation."

The treaty would give the EU a long-term president and a stronger foreign policy chief, a streamlined, more democratic voting system based largely on population size and more say for national and European parliaments.

Polish Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga confirmed her country wanted, like Britain, to be partly exempted from an EU charter on fundamental rights which guarantees certain minimum rights for workers. The treaty would give the charter legal force.


POLISH DEMANDS

Fotyga also demanded that a deal in June on a mechanism to delay EU decisions be included in the treaty, not in a separate declaration. The provision allows small groups of states, short of a blocking minority, to delay decisions for a few months.

The European Parliament and most governments want the clause to be limited in duration and not anchored in the treaty.

Poland's other demands include an increase of the number of influential advisers at the European Court of Justice from the current eight, possibly so that a Pole can be one of them, and that decisions at the European Investment Bank, the EU's lending arm, be reached by unanimity rather than by qualified majority.

Fotyga said campaigning for an early general election expected on Oct. 21 would not undermine her government's ability to reach a deal on the final treaty text next month.

"There is no reason to put forward this kind of theory," she told Reuters.

Several foreign ministers and negotiators played down the Polish issues. "The obstacles are not insurmountable," said Andrew Duff, a European Parliament observer at the negotiations.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband opposed calls for the treaty to be put to a referendum, as demanded by opposition Conservatives and some ruling Labour Party lawmakers and trade unions, saying parliament was "the right way of doing it".

Another issue is the status of the European Central Bank. ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet wrote to Portugal last month voicing concern that the bank's independence might not be guaranteed in the treaty, which lists the ECB as one of the Union's institutions.