Thread by @KellerZoe

The EU is still attempting a colonial power grab. EU concessions do not solve NIP fundamental problems. To get rid of all of them, the EU law must be extirpated from NI.

— from Martin Howe QC (Chairman of Lawyers For Britain) article

telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/2…

Coverage of the NIP has focussed on disruption to trade. But this is just a symptom of an underlying fundamental issue. The NIP imposes in NI a huge number of EU laws, subject to interpretation by the EU Court, amendment by the EU Parliament, and enforcement by the EU Commission.

They include the EU laws on licensing and marketing of medicines. Once the present “grace period” expires, medicines (including vaccines) authorised by the UK regulator will be illegal in NI unless and until they receive authorisation under the EU’s cumbersome system.

At best this will lead to delays and at worst to outright denial of life-saving drugs to patients in Northern Ireland.

Under the NIP, EU laws apply in NI like they are applied within EU member states. But, while EU member states cooperate in the framing of EU laws and nominate their citizens in EU institutions, for NI all these institutions are entirely foreign: these laws are imposed upon them.

The NIP violates the principles of international treaties. Sovereign states simply do not submit to judgments of courts of another treaty party. The idea that only the ECJ should rule on EU law has been resisted by nearly every EU treaty partner, including Norway and Switzerland.

Until Theresa May’s disastrous negotiation of the Withdrawal Agreement and the Protocol, the EU had only succeeded in imposing such clauses on Moldova and two other desperate former Soviet republics.

The EU’s response falls short of its own spin. It offers to simplify – but not remove – some procedures which serve no purpose in protecting the EU single market and which it could have agreed to simplify months ago.

It offers to allow sausages and chilled meats to be shipped from GB to NI, but only if individual certificates are provided, production requirements in the UK remain aligned with EU rules and imports from 3rd countries are excluded.

This reveals the EU’s continuing intent to use the Protocol as a tool to pressure the entire UK into following EU rules.

On medicines, the EU offers to allow certain testing activities to take place in GB but otherwise requires all EU medicines rules to be followed in NI, despite the fact that there is no risk of medicines authorised only in the UK entering RoI and being given to patients there.

The EU has hinted at the possibility of limiting the ECJ to ruling within international arbitrations, rather than via the direct access to it from UK courts. This does not change the issue: laws in the UK would have to be interpreted according to the rulings of a foreign court.

The EU has blinked, but we need much deeper changes in order to preserve the integrity of the UK and to restore the free flow of trade between the different parts of our country guaranteed ever since the Acts of Union.

The EU must be brought to understand that its attempt to grab NI as a colonial territory is to be reversed. The root problem is the application of the EU rules within NI. To get rid of the ECJ in NI, the EU law must be extirpated as well.

The way forward is for the UK and EU to cooperate to curb the flow of non-compliant goods in either direction across the N/S Irish land border while leaving each side free to make and follow its own laws and rules within its own territory (the so-called Mutual Enforcement).