Slovak PM says to back Lisbon Treaty while safeguarding national interests

PRAGUE, Oct. 19 (Xinhua) -- Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said that his country would continue to back the European Union (EU)'s Lisbon Treaty while seeking to safeguard national interests, according to news reaching here Monday from Bratislava.

During a TV program, Fico said his country would act under the principle of neither threatening the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty nor causing damage to the national interests of his country.

Fico said his country was faced with two options: either to veto in the European Council a Czech proposal of being exempted from a part of the Treaty or to insist that it also applies to Slovakia.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus said earlier this month that he was willing to sign the Lisbon Treaty only if the country can get exemption from the Charter of Fundamental Rights to prevent potential property claim by ethnic Germans expelled from the Czechoslovakia after the World War II.

The president demanded that no court within the EU be empowered to dismiss the Benes decrees, which included laws on the confiscation of property of the expelled ethnic Germans and Hungarians at that time, via reassessment, Klaus' secretary Ladislav Jakl said.

Officially called the Decrees of the President of the Republic, this series of laws, which originated with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile during World War II, was invoked after the war to confiscate properties owned by Germans and Hungarians evicted from the former Czechoslovakia, which split into the Czech and Slovak republics in 1993.

Many of the evicted Germans have said that they would sue the Czech government once the country becomes an integral part of the EU judicial system.

With Ireland and Poland having already agreed to the Lisbon Treaty, the Czech Republic now remains the only hurdle to the required unanimous approval of the EU treaty.