UK rejects EU’s Northern Ireland ‘solutions’
European Commission re-floated previously proposed
solutions on trade of medicines, guide dogs and animals between Britain and
Northern Ireland.
BY HANS VON
DER BURCHARD
July 26,
2021 2:59 pm
The U.K. on
Monday rejected the European Commission's proposals for "solutions"
to ease trade friction between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain, which
Brussels set out in two so-called non-papers published earlier the same day.
The two
papers, which had previously been shared with the U.K. government as well as EU
countries, include proposals covering medicines as well as food safety checks —
also known by the technical term sanitary and phytosanitary measures (SPS) —
and the movement of assistance dogs for disabled people.
However,
the two non-papers had already previously been sent to the British government —
the document on medicines went in June — and the two sides remain locked in a
dispute over how to solve trade problems between Northern Ireland and Britain.
A U.K. spokesperson said the papers did not address all the problems and called
for “comprehensive and durable solutions.”
Last week,
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the current trade set-up in the
post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol is "unsustainable" and called
for a renegotiation — an appeal that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen
immediately rejected.
The
non-paper on medicines proposes changes to the EU's own rules so that
regulatory compliance functions, such as quality control tests, could be
permanently conducted in Great Britain as long as it can be ensured that
relevant medicines are only distributed to Northern Ireland and not further
into the EU.
The
Commission says this would "ensure a continued, long-term supply of
medicines in Northern Ireland" as it had been "too costly for certain
operators currently based in Great Britain" to move the regulatory
approval procedures to Northern Ireland or the EU, as was foreseen by the
initial treaty.
Yet the
U.K. government spokesperson said late Monday: “The solution the EU has set out
today remains the same as the one they sent to us in late June — the EU has not
addressed the issues and concerns that we have raised with them.
“The EU’s
proposal was a welcome start but it would be complex to operate, onerous and
would not deal at all with those medicines, such as new cancer drugs, which
under current arrangements must be licensed by the European Medicines Agency in
Northern Ireland. That is why we have proposed in our Command Paper that the
simplest way forward in order to avoid these problems in future is to remove
medicines from the scope of the [Northern Ireland] Protocol altogether.”
The second
non-paper includes proposals "to ease the movement of assistance dogs
accompanying persons travelling from Great Britain to Northern Ireland,"
as well as "to simplify the movement of livestock" between both
parts, according to the Commission. The document further seeks "to clarify
the rules on EU-origin animal products that are moved to Great Britain for
storage before being shipped to Northern Ireland."
The U.K.
spokesperson commented on the second non-paper: “What the EU is presenting as a
package of solutions is in fact only a small subset of the many difficulties
caused by the way the Protocol is operating. We need comprehensive and durable
solutions if we are to avoid further disruption to everyday lives in Northern
Ireland — as we have set out in our Command Paper.”
Commission
Vice President Maroš Šefčovič, the EU's Brexit point person, said the solutions
"were brought about with the core purpose of benefitting the people in
Northern Ireland," adding that "our work is about ensuring that the
hard-earned gains of the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement."
UPDATE:
This article has been updated with U.K. government reaction.
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