EU president aims to solve constitution voting row

Current EU president Italy said that one of its key aims in guiding negotiations on a new constitution for the bloc would be to solve a dispute on how votes are distributed between countries.

A blueprint constitution, ranging from a flag and anthem to a proposal for a new EU foreign minister, was agreed by a Convention for Europe last week. But a final version has to be passed by an Intergovernmental Conference beginning in October.

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said one problem which needed to be solved was the issue of how weightings are distributed to each country's vote.

"We know that Spain has a problem with that," Mr Frattini told Brussels-based reporters visiting the Italian capital to meet top officials from the presidency.

Spain, Poland and some small states back a voting system where small and medium-sized states hold disproportionate power. Under current rules, Spain has just two fewer weighted votes than Germany even though its population is half the size.

The constitution draft foresees a voting system in which decisions would pass if a majority of states representing 60 per cent of the EU population backed them.

The head of the convention, former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing has warned that efforts to unpick the draft could undo the whole project, but several states have problems with the current document.

Mr Frattini said a first big debate on the draft would come when foreign ministers meet for informal talks in September. He said that once the document had been approved, a formal signing ceremony would take place in Rome next year, even though the Italian presidency will have finished by then. The original founding treaty of the EU is called the Treaty of Rome.

Italian Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini, on the steering committee of the convention, said one way to appease Spain and others could be to push back the deadline for when the new voting system would be introduced from 2009. In the talks on the convention, a proposal was made to launch the new voting system in 2012, but this was later dropped.