The European Court has, or should have, no more jurisdiction than is conferred, from time to time, by treaties we have made and implemented i nto our law.

The court does not have an independent life rooted in its own existence.

And its competences can, and should, be changed at the next intergovernmental conference scheduled for 1996 if we are to maintain a balance between aspirations and reality.

As the chairman of the Reflections Group has conceded, art N of the Maastricht Treaty provides the opportunity at that conference for a comprehensive review of the validity of all the treaties over the past 40 years, including the judicial activism of the European Court of Justice.

One of the problems we experience is that the court does not confine itself to judicial matters alone.

It pursues a political policy, as eminent jurists such as Professor Trevor Hartley of the LSE and others such as Sir Patrick Neill have already shown, and this is not compatible with the democracy claimed for the Union.The judges are politically appointed, but why are they invariably federalists when there is deep unease in so many member states on this issue? Why is no judicial experience required of them? Some have only held academic, political or administrative office, or merely been in private practice.

Why is there no age of retirement?There is also the question of secrecy.

The judges swear secrecy of deliberation so that no one is to know how they have voted individually.

There is only one judgment -- no separate concurring, named, attributable or dissenting judgment -- nor any appeal against their conclusions.Even less acceptable is that they go beyond the parameters of the Treaty of Rome, making a mockery of the duty they are supposed to observe, under art 4, to act within the limits of the powers conferred on the court.

As eminent jurists such as Arnull and Usher seem to understand, the court is inclined to believe it has power to confer jurisdiction on itself.

Quis custos custodiet?There is also the problem of language and the undue emphasis given to French as the ultimate language of the court, especially in cases under the European Coal and Steel Community.As EU membership grows, how are the Czechs, Hungarians, Greeks and others, who may find the French text incomprehensible, going to cope, particularly as precision in pleadings can be critical to the outcome of any one case? With discussions in the originating legislative bodies of the Commission and Council of Ministers kept secret, why does the court insist on departing from the literal meaning, resorting instead to the general objectives of the legal instrument? Travaux preparatoires are not available from deliberations of those bodies and it is reprehensible that the court interprets these on the basis that it has a right to decide upon the future of the Community.As Professor Hartley has shown, the court believes in the future promotion of European integration.

In the Chernobyl judgment it conceded that although the Parliament had no right to bring an action, there was a fundamental 'need' to do so in the interests of institutional balance.

In the Defrenne case, it made a retrospective judgment which cut across a legal principle.The result of this is that no one, particularly individuals or companies affected, let alone their legal advisers, can make any sensible prediction of the court's judgments.This will become even more absurd if the competences of the Community are to move, under Maastricht and the intergovernmental conference, into the sphere of European government.

This in itself is a reason why there should be no European constitution and yet, in 1992, the court ruled that the EC/EFTA agreement was uncon stitutional because it did not fit in with the court's views about political integration.

The situation could worsen if the court's submissions to the Reflections Group in the run-up to the next IGC on common foreign and security policy and justice and home affairs, including immigration policy, are anything to go by.

Despite the fact that these areas are declared by treaty to be confined to intergovernmental action, the court is pressing for them to be drawn into its jurisdiction.

Nothing could be more absurd than that judges should determine foreign and security policy.

Finally, the concept of the acquis communautaire, with its ratchet effect, must be recanted at the forthcoming IGC if we are to avoid the handover of political authority to unelected 'guardians' in judicial dress.

At the 1996 intergovernmental conference the competences of the European Union must be reduced and the judicial activism of the court prohibited by requiring the judges simply to interpret the law, rather than making decisions aimed at greater integration.