Since the government of Boris Johnson revealed its intention to eliminate controls on goods arriving in the British province from the rest of the United Kingdom, the EU has continued to denounce unilateral action and has threatened to take commercial and judicial reprisals.
While the prime minister is taking part in a summit of the leaders of the G7 in Germany, a vote of the deputies on the bill to decide its parliamentary course is scheduled for the afternoon.
Citing the burden of controls – implementation of which has been repeatedly postponed – on businesses and the need to maintain peace between Northern Ireland and Ireland, the British government decided to legislate after months of unsuccessful negotiations with Brussels. It also hopes to end the paralysis of local Northern Irish institutions.
“There are useless barriers to trade from the UK to Northern Ireland, and all we are saying is that we can end them without in any way threatening the European single market,” he said. Boris Johnsonwhich asked the European Union to show “flexibility”.
Time is pressing according to the British government, since the unionists of the DUP, who see in the Northern Ireland protocol – negotiated and signed in the framework of Brexit – a threat to the place of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, refuse to participate in the assembly and the executive of the province as long as the controls are not abandoned.
Institutions cannot function without them due to co-governance provided for by the 1998 peace agreement, which ended three decades of violence that left 3,500 dead.
The victory in the local elections at the beginning of May of the Republicans of the Sinn Feinfavorable to the reunification of the island, accentuated the fears of the DUP.
In a statement, the British Foreign Secretary, Liz Trussreiterated London’s position that the Northern Ireland protocol would “undermine” the “delicate balance” of the Good Friday deal, which sealed peace between loyalists to the British crown and pro-reunification Republicans.
The bill “will solve the problems that the protocol has created, ensuring that goods can move within the UK, while avoiding a hard border and protecting Europe’s single market,” he said.
But for Europeans, the British text is “both illegal and unreal”said the European Union’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, João Vale de Almeida, on Sunday.
“We are committed to finding practical solutions” on the application of the protocol, he continued on Sky News, “but we cannot begin to talk if the basis is to say that everything we agreed before must be discarded.”
According to the British project, the goods destined to remain in Northern Ireland, and therefore within the British market, would benefit from a “green” channel that would avoid controls. A “red” channel would be for goods that could enter the EU market through Ireland, which would have to be declared, while the controls would be carried out in the United Kingdom.
After the presentation of the British bill, the European Union announced the relaunch of an infringement procedure, suspended since September 2021, for violation of the protocol, as well as the launch of two others, for non-compliance with the “necessary controls ” in sanitary and phytosanitary matters and for incomplete commercial data given to the EU.
He also laid out in greater detail his proposals made, to no avail, to the British government last October, which the EU claimed would significantly reduce customs controls and formalities on a wide range of goods destined solely for Northern Ireland.
Source: Ambito
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