The United Kingdom is threatening to renege on parts of its Brexit agreement with the European Union, potentially violating international law and upending trade negotiations with the bloc. On Wednesday, the UK government introduced the UK Internal Market Bill, an anodyne-sounding piece of legislation that’s anything but. The bill targets a specific part of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement, otherwise known as the Brexit deal — the same deal that Prime Minister Boris Johnson struck with the European Union last October, which ultimately allowed the UK to leave the EU with a deal on January 31, 2020. When the UK separated from the EU, it entered into a transition period in which both sides were supposed to work out their future relationship on everything from trade to security. That’s what’s been happening since — or not happening, really, as negotiations have largely stalled. That has meant the prospects of striking a comprehensive deal before the end-of-year deadline were looking slimmer and slimmer. Enter the United Kingdom with a curveball of sorts. The UK Internal Market Bill would change some of the terms in the Northern Ireland Protocol, which covered one of the thorniest issues in the first round of negotiations on the Brexit deal. Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, shares a border with Ireland, which is part of the EU. Keeping that border open to enable the free flow of goods and people is central to the Good Friday Agreement, a 1998 peace deal that sought to put an end to decades of conflict in Northern Ireland through seamless North-South cooperation. The Northern Ireland Protocol was designed to protect those interests, no matter what happened in the larger trade talks between the EU and the UK. But Johnson’s government has now decided it would like to make unilateral changes to a plan it agreed to less than a year ago — undermining the agreement and the already tenuous negotiations with the EU on any future relationship.
Sep 2020. Proposal to Change UK Brexit Deal
