European Constitution
Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Mr John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Local and Devolved Government Affairs; South Holland and The Deepings, Conservative)
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will list changes to the English text of the European Constitution that have occurred since the Intergovernmental Conference, broken down by article.
Mr Denis MacShane (Minister of State (Europe), Foreign & Commonwealth Office; Rotherham, Labour)
Following the June Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), the draft EU Constitutional Treaty (Command Paper 6289) was consolidated into a single document and drawn up in all the authentic EU languages. These different versions were scrutinised by specialist lawyer linguists, as occurs for every EU Treaty, to ensure there were no discrepancies between the different language versions without making any substantive changes to the text adopted at the IGC. The final text was published as Command Paper 6429. Listing such discrepancies by article would incur disproportionate cost.