In the space of two weeks, in
June 2009, the Irish government secured ‘guarantees’ in advance of the second
referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and the German Federal Constitutional Court
gave its ruling in the famous Lisbon decision.
Whilst these two documents entail and comprise two completely different legal
responses to the Lisbon Treaty, there is an interesting point of similarity
between them: both seek to recognise (and enshrine?) the primacy of the
national constitutional order in certain specific competence fields, and the
specific fields mentioned are, for the most part, the same in both documents.
This presentation seeks, first, to examine what is sought to be protected at and by
the national constitutional legal order in both documents and, secondly, to contrast
the legal status of the two documents in order to assess their constitutional
strength.