Will the Danes do it again?

As we know, the Danes very nearly scuppered the Maastricht Treaty and would have done if we had had a serious politician as a Prime Minister instead of John Major. He, instead of taking the opportunity of the first Danish referendum coming up with the "wrong" answer to say that this may be the time to stop and think and reconsider and so on and so on, joined the other EC (not to become the EU until the Maastricht Treaty was implemented) member states to bully Denmark into voting the "right" way the second time round.

Subsequently, the Danes made it quite clear that they did not want to be in the euro (and are not). The chances are that, had they been asked, they would have voted against the Lisbon Treaty. They were not, as their Ministry of Justice had pronounced that under the Lisbon Treaty there would be no transference of power from Copenhagen to Brussels and, therefore, there was no need for a referendum. What worried little bunnies they must have been.

However, a regular reader of this blog informs me that things might, just might stir in the state of Denmark. The information is on a Swedish blog and is about the Danish High Court having to decide whether the signing of the Lisbon Treaty by the Danish government was against that country's constitution.

It would appear that Article 20 of the Danish Constitution requires either a referendum or a five sixths majority in Parliament if powers are passed on to a transnational organization (which, of course, they were not, as the Ministry of Justice tells us and the Danes).

The Referendum Committee (which is what I take Folkeafstemningskomitéen to mean) has managed to take its case all the way up to the High Court, which will pronounce on the subject at noon on February 20. If it were any other country, I'd say that the chances of the Court doing anything except rolling over and asking the eurocrats to tickle their tummy are zero. But this is Denmark, after all, where people do odd things.