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Treaty of Lisbon (No. 4)

I had not intended to cite specific decisions, but it appears that I will have to. A 1999 decision in the Albany International case shows how fatal the relegation of this issue to the protocol will be—[Interruption.] Of course that decision was not about a protocol, because the provision was not in a protocol then. In that judgment, the ECJ noted that article 3 of the EU treaty required both"““a system ensuring that competition in the internal market is not distorted””" and"““a policy in the social sphere””." It set to work to resolve the conflict on the explicit basis that both were objectives of the Union as set out in the article 3 of the treaty. Now one of those objectives will be removed from the opening articles of the treaty and put in a protocol on page 199. The Secretary of State wants us to believe that the ECJ will give the same weight to the statement in a protocol to the treaty as it gave to it when set out in leading articles of the treaty.