Between Constraints and Innovation: The Role of the Groupe de Rédaction and the Legal Shape of the EEC Treaty

This working paper is a draft chapter from a forthcoming book co-authored with Full Teaching Professor, Dr. Anne Boerger (Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta) and tentatively entitled: The Dual Nature of the European Community: The Making of the Institutional and Legal Dimensions of European Integration, 1950 to 1967. The book is an archive based, historical exploration of how the institutional and legal dimensions of the European Communities (EC) were developed from 1950 to 1967.[1] The present working paper deals with the famous Groupe de rédaction, the committee of legal experts, that negotiated the legal dimension of the Treaties of Rome (1957). The negotiations of the Treaties of Rome were conducted from September 1956 to March 1957 at ministerial, heads of delegation and expert level.[2] The Treaties were then signed in Rome on 25 March 1957 and finally ratified by the parliaments of the six founding states.[3] It was at ministerial level that the key decisions about the political and economic nature of the Treaties and the core functions of the institutions were made. The Groupe de rédaction, however, assisted the governments in this task, while also drafting the texts of the two treaties (Treaty of EURATOM and Treaty of the European Economic Community), designing the legal system and the Court of Justice.

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