Den tjeckiska senaten har nyligen röstat för Lissabonfördraget, men president Vaclav Klaus kommer tills vidare inte att skriva under det. Utan hans underskrift kan fördraget inte träda i kraft.

Jag och Vaclav Klaus står på motsatta sidor i de flesta frågor, men jag gillar politiker som har principer. Klaus kommentar efter beslutet:

I must express my disappointment that following unprecedented political and media pressure from both foreign and domestic sources, some Czech Senators retreated from the publicly expressed views they held until recently, undermining thereby their own political and civic integrity, and have agreed with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.

They thus turned their backs on the long-term interest of the Czech Republic, putting before that the short-term interests of current governmental office-holders as well as their own personal interests.

It is a sad evidence of another failure on the part of a significant element of our political elite, which parallels other bad moments in Czech history. Our politicians
have always found some cowardly reasons for actions of this sort: We are too small, too weak; we do not mean anything in the European context; we must conform even if we do not agree with what we are conforming to.

This is something I reject. We either regained our sovereignty after November 1989, and together with it the responsibility for the fate of our country, or it was all a tragic mistake. This is a very topical point to make in the year of the twentieth anniversary of November 1989.

Now I will wait to see if a group of Czech senators, as some of them previously announced, request our Constitutional Court for another scrutiny of the Lisbon Treaty in relation to our Constitution. If this takes place, I will not be considering my decision to ratify the Lisbon Treaty or not before the Constitutional Court issues its decision.

My views on this matter are known and clear. I cannot afford to be resolutely against something at one moment, and then, because it fits in with my personal political career objectives, to pretend to change my opinion.

Let me emphasize that for this moment, the Lisbon Treaty is dead, because it was rejected in a referendum in one of the Member States. That is why my deciding on the ratification of this Treaty is not the issue of the day.