Council of Europe: European Political Community

Deputies of the foreign ministers of the ECSC members met in Rome from September 22 through October 9, 1953, to examine in detail a draft statute for a European political community prepared by the Ad Hoc Assembly and submitted to the ECSC ministers on March 10, 1953. A meeting of the foreign ministers, originally scheduled to begin on October 22, 1953, opened in the Hague on November 26 under the chairmanship of Joseph Back (Luxembourg). At the conclusion of the meeting on November 28, the ministers issued a communique outlining their decisions. The ministers approved sections of the report of the deputies on their Rome meeting on institutional and economic matters on which unanimous agreement had been reached. An assembly was to be created as the lower house of the community representing the peoples of the community; an upper house representing states was also to be created. While it had been agreed that the lower house would be elected by direct universal suffrage, the methods had not yet been determined. The ministers exchanged views on the organization and powers of the executive branch of the proposed community but reached no decisions. The principle of the creation of a single European court was approved and a committee of jurists established to consider further legal questions involved in the creation of a political community. The ministers also agreed that the community would include, in ways yet to be determined, the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Defense Community. The ministers appointed a committeee to continue discussion of the political community and begin drafting the text of a treaty; it was to report to the ministers at a meeting in Brussels on March 30, 1954.