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Why Europe may soon split along religious lines (The Spectator)

Thursday, 2nd August 2007

I have a piece in today's magazine about the EU draft reform treaty - on an aspect which has been ignored. Here's an extract:

It’s a truism with EU documents that the devil is in the detail, but truisms are called that because they are, well, true. And few people seem to have realised the profound importance of footnote 18 to the proposed draft wording for a replacement of Article 6 on fundamental rights.

If you’re lost after that last sentence already, that’s probably why no one else has noticed it. But here it is. It’s termed a ‘Unilateral Declaration by Poland’: ‘The Charter does not affect in any way the right of Member States to legislate in the sphere of public morality, family law as well as the protection of human dignity and respect for human physical and moral integrity.’

Seems a bit obscure? It isn’t. It goes to the heart of EU society and presages — within the next decade — a revived social division across the EU based on religion. Because ‘...the protection of human dignity and respect for human physical and moral integrity’ is EU-speak for bans on new medical areas such as embryonic stem cell research, gene therapy and even the latest breakthrough, RNA (ribonucleic acid). The declaration is designed to ensure that member state governments will remain free to ban such research.

One should state at the outset that Poland — or any other member state — should of course be free to legislate as it sees fit on such matters. That Poland feels the need for such a declaration is because of the very issue on which most comment on the draft treaty has been based — that the new voting arrangements threaten to trample on member states’ freedoms.

But the issues raised by such technologies go beyond the capacity of democracies to resist.