Havel on Europe's future

The Czech President Vaclav Havel has said that sooner or later the European Union will need a constitution, based on the charter for basic rights declared at the EU summit in Nice last December. He expressed the view in an interview with the former EU Commission president, Jacques Delors, published in the French paper, Le Monde and the German Die Zeit. He added that the constitution should be simple and comprehensible to ordinary citizens as well as bureaucrats. In response Mr Delors was more cautious, saying that a well-phrased treaty between the member countries would be more effective than a badly written constitution.