UK Government’s negotiating position on CJEU seen lacking, legally unsound

UK Government’s negotiating position on CJEU seen lacking, legally unsound

July 26, 2017, PaRR

Bart Van Vooren is quoted in a PaRR article regarding the UK Government's negotiating position on the role of the Court of Justice of the European Union following the completion of Brexit. According to Van Vooren, the EU was “in a slightly stronger position from an international law perspective” regarding pending cases and that the UK would likely “still be subject to the obligations that were applicable to the time of the facts occurring."

Van Vooren adds that a crucial sentence in the EU’s position paper on governance states that “enforcement and dispute settlement mechanisms must ‘respect the autonomy of the Union and of its legal order,'" meaning that the CJEU “will always be the supreme arbiter of EU law." Van Vooren also expects a new EU-UK court to be set up to deal with transitional issues such as citizens’ rights, which could be similar to the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) Court, stressing that “such a court cannot be competent to interpret EU law” and could only be competent for the “new EU-UK acquis."