Brussels is to launch legal action against the UK as early as Monday, as a chorus of criticism greeted Boris Johnson’s plan to unilaterally rip up his 2020 Brexit deal with the EU covering trade with Northern Ireland.
The British prime minister insisted that new legislation to override the Northern Ireland protocol was vital to stabilise the peace process in the region and that the changes were “relatively trivial”.
But the move was condemned in Brussels. EU officials said the European Commission would respond immediately, by restarting a legal process frozen last year while negotiations were held on reforming the protocol.
Simon Coveney, Ireland’s foreign minister, said Johnson’s unilateral approach marked a “new low”, while a majority of elected members of Northern Ireland’s assembly also attacked the move.
A letter to Johnson signed by 52 out of 90 assembly members, including Sinn Féin’s first minister-elect Michelle O’Neill, rejected “in the strongest possible terms your government’s reckless new protocol legislation”.
The Northern Ireland protocol bill, published on Monday, aims to remove most checks on trade in goods from Great Britain to NI at Irish Sea ports, helping to erase the internal trade border that infuriates pro-UK unionists.
Goods destined to stay in NI would pass through a green channel with no checks, while only GB goods intended for onward travel to the Republic of Ireland and the EU single market would go through a “red lane”.
The legislation, drafted in consultation with Eurosceptic Tory MPs, would end the oversight role of the European Court of Justice as well as EU control over state aid and value added tax in the region.
The bill would also create a dual regulatory regime, allowing goods originating in Great Britain to circulate in the region provided they met UK standards, rather than the EU’s.
EU officials said the UK had already failed to implement large parts of the deal agreed by Johnson. Any case would probably end up at the ECJ, which could impose fines for non-compliance.
If the UK refuses to pay and comply with its judgment, the EU could end parts of its post-Brexit trade deal, applying tariffs to British goods. Brussels has already indicated it will exclude British scientists from the €95bn Horizon Europe research project, in its first economic reprisal.
Johnson said a trade war between the UK and the EU would be a “gross, gross overreaction”. He added: “All we are trying to do is simplify things, trying to remove barriers to trade to Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”
But Downing Street could not say whether ministers had modelled for the possible impact of trade reprisals — an issue that had concerned chancellor Rishi Sunak — through a formal impact assessment on the bill.
Leo Varadkar, deputy prime minister of Ireland, said in an interview that legal action was “proportionate” but cautioned against a trade war, arguing that Johnson faces a long slog to get his bill through the UK parliament.
“What’s happening here is serious, but there’s a big difference between proposed legislation and actual legislation being enacted and then it actually being used,” he said.
The US has also urged Johnson to negotiate with Brussels a settlement to the Northern Ireland problem. Joe Biden, US president, and EU leaders are likely to confront Johnson on the issue at a G7 summit in Germany later this month.
Johnson denies the legislation breaks international law, arguing it is necessary to protect the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to Northern Ireland after three decades of conflict.
“Our higher and prior legal commitment to the country is to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and to the balance and stability of that agreement,” he told LBC Radio on Monday.
Downing Street is challenging claims that the bill is illegal under international law by citing the “doctrine of necessity”, arguing that it needs to take urgent action to protect an essential national interest.
But Sir Jonathan Jones, former head of the government legal service who resigned over Johnson’s earlier handling of the Northern Ireland issue said the bill was “completely extraordinary” and was “at the extreme end of anything we might have expected”.
The Democratic Unionist party, Northern Ireland’s largest unionist party, has refused to restore the power-sharing agreement in the region after the nationalist Sinn Féin became the largest party in the May elections.
DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson on Monday welcomed the bill but stressed “we need to be sure the legislation is going forward” before his party could return to Northern Ireland’s political institutions.
“I don’t believe what the government is proposing is illegal,” he said. “I believe what the government is proposing is a solution.”
In response to the legislation, Maroš Šefčovič, the European commissioner for Brexit, is expected on Monday afternoon to ask the commission to issue an opinion on the paused legal case — on a unilateral UK decision to delay checks on goods and pets — the final step before going to court.
Other new cases on alleged breaches of the protocol would start with a letter to London. All would probably take more than a year to conclude.
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