Reply to post: Re: Negotiating...

UK science suffers as lawmakers continue to dither over Brexit negotiations

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Negotiating...

This isn't sufficient for the EU to consider them as equivalent. It is refusing to accept the UK standards as being the same as the EU (even though they are) unless the UK agrees never to diverge in the future.

First there is the rule that certain goods are not accepted into the single market from third countries. This has already been changed by the EU just for NI. Why did the UK not negotiate this in the first place if UK government documents show they were aware of the problem (e.g. raw meats)?

The UK-NZ agreement is an example of the UK choosing not to enforcing regulatory compliance on imports and these goods could be exported on to the EU without being properly labelled. The EU would be right to check rules of origin for these products. They also did not want to check regulatory compliance on Australian imports (before the agreement fell apart) and US imports (although those did not even get started).

Finally, the "sewage" problem is a current example of UK divergence from EU law, on paper the law is the same but the lack of UK enforcement means that products have to be checked, in particular fish and seafood.

It does not apply this restriction to other "3rd countries", where it has negotiated equivalence status based on the actual situation.

No, it negotiated equivalence status based on the manufacturer in the 3rd country manufacturing to single market standards or the farm in the 3rd country producing to SPS standards. There is a chain of paperwork and inspections to prove that and if the EU single market rules change in the future, 3rd countries must follow that change.

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