Thread by @tconnellyRTE

BREAKING: The EU has resumed legal action against the UK following the publication of the bill that would overturn the Northern Ireland Protocol.

2/ A senior EU official has warned that the UK could be brought before the European Court of Justice within two months over unilateral action which London took last year.

3/ The Commission has also announced fresh legal action over the alleged failure of the UK to build and staff border control posts at Northern Ireland ports and an alleged failure by the UK to provide real time data on the movement of goods between Great Britain and NI

4/ The European Commission has also revealed what it calls large scale attempted smuggling of goods into the single market via Northern Ireland.

5/ A senior EU official said that last year there were seizures at Northern ports of weapons, counterfeit smartphones, heroine, cocaine, tobacco, counterfeit medicines which were potentially destined for the EU single market.

6/ The official said the UK bill would give British ministers the powers to disapply all but three elements of the Protocol.

7/ He said those three elements, which include the Common Travel Areas, North-South Cooperation and citizens’ rights, all areas which were active before Brexit and before the Protocol.

8/ The European Commission has also set out further detail on how its own proposals to reduce the burden of the Protocol published last October.

9/ A senior official said that under the EU’s proposals an entire truck of goods moving from a Sainsburys depot in the UK to a branch in Northern Ireland would only need three pages of documentation.

10/ He said this offer, was a “fleshing out” of the EU’s position. Unilateral action, he said, “was not at all necessary.”

The official said the UK bill was a clear breach of international law, even if it didn’t enact the legislation.

11/ “Any action by a party to an international agreement to disapply an international agreement unilaterally is a breach of international law and creating the possibility to disapply unilaterally that agreement is also a breach of international law,” the official said.

12/ The official said the UK bill essentially meant that the UK would be deciding what could and could not enter the EU’s single market.

13/ The official said: “It is legally and politically inconceivable that the UK sets these conditions unilaterally. It is simply not acceptable to the EU.”

14/ The official said the Northern Ireland Protocol meant that EU single market rules for goods applied, and the only court which could interpret those rules was the European Court of Justice.

15/ The court was there for the benefit of traders both in the EU and in Northern Ireland, he said.

He said it would be unacceptable for the court to be removed from the equation, and the court itself would regard that as illegal.

16/ Despite the deepening standoff, a second senior EU official said the EU would resume talks with the UK “tomorrow”, if the UK returned to the proposals the European Commission presented last October.

17/ Officials have said the UK’s ideas for a green lane for goods not moving into the single market were not dissimilar to the EU’s idea of an express lane.

18/ The difference was that the EU required some checks and data so as to be able to make a risk assessment of what was entering Northern Ireland, and to be sure that the goods were in fact not crossing the border into the south.