A new report written by Dr René Repasi, commissioned by the German Green party will exacerbate concerns over the protection of EU’s environmental and social standards in the withdrawal agreement in its current form.
The backstop deal, agreed between the EU and the UK in November 2018 as a part of the draft withdrawal agreement but voted down three times in the House of Commons, states that the whole of the UK would remain in a de facto customs union with the EU. That is until a trade and security agreement has been reached that prevents the setting up of a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The new German report, however, warns that the wording of the deal means the EU side will find it impossible to stop a more aggressive Britain led by a Boris Johnson or a Jacob Rees-Mogg from flouting common environmental and social standards while still being able to export British products into the single market. The findings of the report are also of importance for a future trade agreement between the EU and the UK as both have declared that they want to model the level-playing field rules in such agreement upon the example in the withdrawal agreement.
“If the EU wants to have a level playing field, it must not just set up the goals but also assign a referee,” said the author of the report, EU law expert Dr René Repasi. “At the moment it has even given the UK licence to assign its own players with officiating the match.”
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About René Repasi
Dr René Repasi is Assistant Professor at Erasmus School of Law and acts as Scientific Coordinator of the European Research Centre for Economic and Financial Governance (EURO-CEFG) of the Universities of Leiden, Delft and Rotterdam since November 2014. Before his appointment at EURO-CEFG he used to work as Assistant Professor for EU law at the Ruprecht Karls University of Heidelberg, as a researcher at the Institute for German and European Corporate and Economic LawOpent extern at the chair of Professor Peter-Christian Müller-Graff and as lecturer for EU law at the University for Applied Sciences in Fulda (Germany). René Repasi studied law at the Universities of Heidelberg and Montpellier I. During his legal clerkship, he used to work for the European Commission and at the European Court of Justice in the cabinet of Advocate General Prof. Dr Juliane Kokott. He holds a PhD on 'The Impact of the Supremacy of Union law on the Private International law of the Member States' from the University of Heidelberg.
His research interests revolve around legal matters relating to economic and financial governance, banking regulation, constitutional and institutional implications of EMU and ‘Brexit’.
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Source: the Guardian
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