The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, agreed this Sunday to continue "in person" the negotiations to achieve "practical and shared solutions" on the Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland, and the The first meeting of this new phase will be held this Monday in the town of Berkshire, in the south of the United Kingdom.
"Today, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak, agreed to continue their work in person towards practical and shared solutions to the range of complex challenges around the Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland", indicates the joint statement published by the European Commission in Brussels. Therefore, the note continues, "President von der Leyen will meet tomorrow with the Prime Minister in the United Kingdom."
"Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and I have agreed to continue working in person towards shared practical solutions under the Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland. I will therefore meet the Prime Minister in the UK tomorrow," Von der Leyen tweeted. , with a link to the joint declaration and with a photo of the flags of the European Union and the United Kingdom.
German politics and the British leader had held a face-to-face meeting on the 18th on the margins of the Munich Security Conference (Germany), in which they agreed to continue negotiating to resolve the pending points of the protocol. Von der Leyen and Sunak then agreed that good progress had been made in the search for solutions, although they considered that "intensive" work was needed at the "official and ministerial" level.
Since then, this intensive work has been led on the European side by the Vice President of the European Commission, Maros Sefcovic, who in recent days has held face-to-face meetings and by videoconference with the British Foreign Minister, James Cleverly, and for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris. This same Sunday, the British deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, said that an EU agreement on Northern Ireland was "about" to be closed and that it will be "a matter of days, not weeks".
In an interview on the "Sky News" channel, Raab announced that, according to the terms of what was negotiated with Brussels, the role of the European Court of Justice "will be significantly limited" to resolve possible disputes between the EU and the United Kingdom in North Ireland. The "number two" of the Executive also announced that the cabinet of the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, will give up promoting the law that would allow breaking parts of the protocol unilaterally.
Raab's statements came after Sunak assured in an interview published today in the Sunday Times that his government "is giving everything" to "finish the pending issues of Brexit." The signs that the agreement seems close also came the day before from Dublin.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said on Saturday that negotiations between Brussels and London to reform the Northern Irish Protocol "are reaching their conclusion." "Now we have to make one last effort to achieve it, because the benefits are enormous: it would allow us to put the (autonomous) Assembly in the North back on track, make the Good Friday Agreement work and lay much more positive foundations for the relationship between the UK, Ireland and the EU," the Irish leader told reporters.
The British province of Northern Ireland remains without a government due to the rejection of the second force, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to join a unity executive with the most voted formation, the nationalist Sinn Féin, until the protocol is reformed .
In the United Kingdom, the deputies of the ruling Conservative Party have been ordered to be present at Monday's session of the House of Commons (Lower), presumably to endorse the pact that London and Brussels finalize to settle their post-Brexit relationship.
The protocol, designed to avoid a physical border between the two Irelands, keeps Northern Ireland within the Community and British internal market, so trade controls between the United Kingdom and the EU are carried out at entry points Northern Irish, which entails a new bureaucracy that affects trade.
This commercial border located in the Irish Sea is also a political barrier for the unionist community, which maintains that it jeopardizes the relationship of the province with the rest of the United Kingdom.
