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“There are no buffers,” complained an EU diplomat. It refers to the tight schedule of the trade deal with Great Britain. Over the weekend, experts from the 27 EU governments will analyze around 1,300 pages of treaty texts that the EU and the UK have negotiated: pages full of complicated paragraphs and tables that are supposed to avoid a very hard break and the introduction of tariffs at the end of the year. The EU Commission has not yet published it for the general public, it is Süddeutsche Zeitung however before. That’s an impressive 1246 pages, plus about 50 more pages for the supplemental agreements. The main text of the treaty fills about 400 of them. The rest are attachments and minutes.
At a meeting in Brussels on Monday, EU ambassadors from member states want to decide to start the approval process. Normally the EU Council of Ministers would make the decision to put the agreement into effect, but due to Corona and limited time, a meeting of ministers in Brussels is no longer possible. Therefore, governments should give up their place in the so-called written procedure.
This requires the approval of all 27 states, and some governments must consult their parliament beforehand. However, all approvals should be available by Tuesday – at least that’s the plan. Then there were two days until New Year’s Eve to sign the contract and publish it in the Official Journal of the EU. Joint signing ceremonies are tough in Corona times: perhaps the agreement needs to first be signed in Brussels and then shipped to London, or vice versa.
The EU Parliament will only discuss the treaty in the new year
In London, the House of Commons and Lords must give their consent before the Queen gives Royal Assent. A special session of parliament is scheduled for Wednesday. The seat of parliament is considered safe, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson has a solid majority there and even the opposition Labor party wants to vote for the treaty.
However, the agreement would only go into effect temporarily on January 1. Final ratification will take place later, once the European Parliament has considered it and given its approval. This is no longer possible before the turn of the year, as members of parliament only wanted to vote if they had had a few days to discuss the agreement in the relevant committees. The delay has the advantage that the contract texts can be translated from English into the other 23 official EU languages by then as required.
The agreement was reached at 2:44 pm
The agreement on the agreement was only reached on Thursday, Christmas Eve: at 2:44 p.m., as one negotiator recalls. It was already clear Tuesday night that there was a solution to a lingering point of contention in recent months: the rules for fair competition between companies in the UK and their rivals in the EU. However, catch quotas for EU fleets in fish-rich British waters had yet to be clarified. Until now, EU fishermen have been able to fish a lot there, to the detriment of their British counterparts. Johnson was determined to change that. The industry is economically almost insignificant in both the UK and the EU, and yet a deal could have failed because of it.
In a series of phone calls, Johnson and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen finally agreed that EU fleets would gradually reduce their catches in British waters over a period of five and a half years – by a quarter of the value. previous capture. Thereafter, exactly ten years after the EU referendum in the summer of 2016, catch quotas will be set as requested by the British in the annual negotiations between London and Brussels. “Von der Leyen knew exactly what to expect from governments like the French and Danish, for whom the issue is sensitive, and Johnson knew what he could sell to his Brexiters at home,” says an EU diplomat.
The contract regulates the catch quotas, from Alfonsino to whiting
A deal could have been announced on Wednesday afternoon, but negotiators decided to break this agreed 25 percent reduction to species, fisheries and years, in such a way that the load is distributed fairly among the EU states involved. “We could have made up for that in a few months,” complains a source. But the haggling continued throughout the night. At some point, the British and EU negotiators realized that they were using different numbers as a base – this time span also cost time.
The tables on catch quotas until 2026, which in the end delayed everything, only occupy five pages in the contract text, from Alfonsino’s A (also known as Shiny Slime Head) to Whiting’s W.
