Thursday, March 28

Brexit: London and Brussels will intensify their contacts to close the negotiations on Northern Ireland | International



The European Commission and the British Government have resumed the negotiation on the application of the Brexit agreements in Northern Ireland after the Christmas break and, apparently, they seem to have done it on the right foot. This Friday, in fact, Vice President Maros Sefcovic and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Liz Truss, have issued a joint statement, something unusual in recent months, on the first meeting between the two after the British has taken over these talks, which until last month was led by David Frost, the resigned minister for Brexit from Boris Johnson’s Executive. “The meeting was held in a cordial atmosphere. Both agreed that the technicians will meet next week in intense conversations, “says the text.

With the departure of Frost from the Executive, this first meeting was expected with some expectation. Frost is one of the members of the British conservative party with the toughest and most ideological positions on Brexit, and his personality had strongly marked the negotiations due to his constant threats to resort to article 16 of the Northern Irish Protocol, which supposes the unilateral suspension of the agreement that both parties signed for the entire British Withdrawal Agreement from the EU, which regulates relations between London and Brussels, to go ahead. In Brussels, the new head of the negotiating team was expected to maintain a more pragmatic position, but an article that she published days ago in the British press had reduced this hope. Finally, it seems that, at least in this first meeting, this new beginning allows us to see with some optimism the possibility that a way out of this matter will be found.

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The Protocol was an addition to the general agreements between the EU and London that made it possible to find a solution to the thorniest problem of Brexit, the Ulster lace after the departure of the United Kingdom. The possibility of a physical border between the counties of Northern Ireland and the rest of the Island was thus avoided, putting at risk the delicate coexistence in that area between Catholics and Protestants and the Good Friday agreements of 1998, which put an end to terrorist violence between the two communities. But the application of this protocol, especially in the traffic of goods, created some daily problems that the Government of London used to renege on a pact it had signed in November 2019 and demand that everything be renegotiated again.

This position has always been rejected by Brussels, which refuses to start over. The European Commission does not deny that the application of the protocol has brought about disruptions in the exchange of goods and that is why it has offered the reduction of many of the bureaucratic procedures necessary in the arrival of products from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, since this area is now within the common market. But what he has flatly refused is to dispense with the role of the Court of Justice of the European Union, a demand from London that Truss reiterated in his newspaper article. Brussels’ argument is that it would spell the end of market unity.

So far, after three months of negotiations and the first deadline set before Christmas for the resolution of the conflict, enough progress has only been made on the arrival of medicines to Northern Ireland from Great Britain.

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