The European Commission has sent recommendation to the European Council to begin the next phase of the orderly withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union.
The draft negotiating directives, which supplement the negotiating directives from May 2017, set out additional details on possible transitional arrangements.
These include no “cherry picking” – the UK will continue to participate in the Customs Union and the Single Market; The Union acquis should continue to apply in full to and in the UK; and all existing regulatory, budgetary, supervisory, judiciary and enforcement instruments and structures will apply, including the competence of the Court of Justice of the European Union.
The UK will be a third country as of 30 March 2019. As a result, it will no longer be represented in EU institutions, agencies, bodies and offices.
Finally, the transition period needs to be clearly defined and precisely limited in time. The European Commission recommends that it should not last beyond 31 December 2020.
The recommendation also recalls the need to translate into legal terms the results of the first phase of the negotiations, as outlined in the communication and joint report.
It underlines that work needs to be completed on all withdrawal issues, including those not yet addressed in the first phase, such as the overall governance of the Withdrawal Agreement and substantive issues such as goods placed on the market before the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.
