Amato Group

The Amato Group, officially the Action Committee for European Democracy (ACED) was a group of high-level European politicians unofficially working on rewriting the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe into what became known as the Treaty of Lisbon following its rejection by French and Dutch voters.

The group was backed by the Barroso Commission, who sent two representatives, the commissioners Danuta Hübner (regional policy) and Margot Wallström (communications). It was led by Giuliano Amato, a former Prime Minister of Italy who was also Vice-President of the original European Convention.

The group consisted of 16 members from 14 member states of the European Union, including one current European Commissioner:

The group first met in Rome on 30 September 2006. On 4 June 2007 they released the completed draft text. The size of the text is cut from 63,000 words in 448 articles in the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (EU Constitution) to 12,800 in 70 articles in the proposed text of a new EU-treaty. The sized down text came from including only the innovations contained in the third part of the EU Constitution – which essentially ties together former EU treaties – and putting them into additional protocols. The two protocols would be attached to the existing Treaty on the European Union and the Treaty Establishing the European Community.

The text stripped the rejected constitution of its constitutional elements, including the article on the EU's symbols and the controversial "God-less" preamble, reduced the Charter of Fundamental Rights to one legally binding article and foresees a new name for new EU foreign policy chief, called 'Union foreign minister' in the Constitution.

The new treaty would not include everything in a single document, as the Constitution would do, but rather:

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