European Union (Amendment) Bill

If you invent fairy stories and keep telling them, they acquire a life of their own; they go down as bedtime reading for children down the generations. What we have is much more precise than the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, would have us believe. The whole question of legal personality is not a new phenomenon in international organisations; it is a constancy. It applies in the United Nations and in the International Criminal Court. It even applies in the Universal Postal Union. All these bodies have legal personality. The change that has been made, bearing in the mind the need to clarify ““legal personality”” for the European Union, is very simple and quite clearly backed up by Declaration 26 of the Intergovernmental Conference. For the sake of everyone having the same song sheet, I will briefly read one sentence from Declaration 24 on the legal personality of the European Union: "““The Conference confirms that the fact that the European Union has a legal personality will not in any way authorise the Union to legislate or to act beyond the competences conferred upon it by the Member States in the Treaties””." That will satisfy the overwhelming majority of people. I do not expect it to satisfy the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch. He will continue to tell his fairytales, and the rest of us will continue to ignore them.