Citizens’ rights over their personal data have become a focal point of the ongoing WTO e-commerce negotiations. What is the role of privacy in the digital economy, ask Serena Cesareo and Stella Canessa? They argue that the UK has the potential to lead a data-secure digital future. 60 per cent of the world population is connected to the internet right now and while digital users still cluster in North America and Europe, big tech is looking to change that. Google, Facebook, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX all run projects to expand internet access in underserved regions. These platf ..read more

Citizens’ rights over their personal data have become a focal point of the ongoing WTO e-commerce negotiations. What is the role of privacy in the digital economy, ask Serena Cesareo and Stella Canessa? They argue that the UK has the potential to lead a data-secure digital future. 60 per cent of the world population is connected to the internet right now and while digital users still cluster in North America and Europe, big tech is looking to change that. Google, Facebook, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX all run projects to expand internet access in underserved regions. These platf ..read more

Brexit has removed the EU as an external support system that prevented devolution from escalating and undermining the union. In this edited extract from his new book, State and Nation in the United Kingdom: The Fractured Union, Michael Keating (University of Aberdeen) warns that the Conservative Party’s vision of the UK as a ‘unitary state’ might fracture it even more.  The UK’s union was never a unified project or ideology but rather a complex structure with numerous strands, which sometimes cohere and sometimes pull apart. To recall the metaphor in the book’s title, it is a bone s ..read more

The UK should move forward from financial services equivalence with the EU, writes Apostolos Thomadakis (CEPS). Furthermore, it should develop a clear focus for the City of London as a non-EU financial centre. After nine rounds of negotiations held between March and October 2020, covering eleven areas, the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) was concluded on December 24th. It is fair to say that the City has ended up with a No-Deal Brexit in terms of financial services. There is nothing substantive in the agreement itself for financial services as the negotiations did not deal with th ..read more

In the UK, the ECJ had been called a foreign court in the Brexit debate. However, the term comes from Switzerland. The notion of a foreign court was used to refer to an international court that includes judges from other states. However, this notion is fallacious, argues Carl Baudenbacher (LSE). The decisive factor is whether a court is neutral. If a state belongs to an international organisation, the international court in question is neutral towards that state. This applies to the ICJ, for example, regardless of whether a state provides a judge or not. The ECJ, on t ..read more

Trust between the EU and the UK is in short supply. This poses risks to British-European security relations, writes Gijs de Vries (LSE). As Brexit unfolds, three issues, in particular, may give rise to tensions: data protection, human rights, and external security cooperation.   While the ink on the 2020 EU-UK Trade and Cooperation agreement might have dried, Brexit’s consequences will be felt for many years across a wide range of policy areas. Whereas economic ramifications have been widely discussed the consequences for security have drawn less attention. How will Brexit affect the saf ..read more

Following weeks of disrupted trade flows, rejected calls to invoke Article 16, security concerns for officials conducting checks required at ports, and a European Commission misjudgement which would have seen Article 16 invoked, enough has been enough for Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). In a statement issued by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) on 2nd February 2021, a strategy was outlined with the aim of setting Northern Ireland “free” from the Withdrawal Agreement’s Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland. The five-point plan includes disrupting engagement in North-S ..read more

The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement is a free trade agreement like no other: the first between parties negotiating from a position of regulatory convergence; the first trade deal in which the EU has accepted the principle of no tariffs and no quotas, but also the first trade deal which not only incorporates provisions that can broaden and deepen the Agreement’s scope, but also narrow it. However, at what cost are the parties willing to increase divergence, asks Totis Kotsonis (Pinsent Masons LLP)? The deed is done. After an intense and unprecedented short period (nine months) of tr ..read more

The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement contains a number of provisions ‘locking-in’ the UK’s continued commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). As with many other areas, far from closing arguments about the ECHR and human rights after Brexit, the deal shifts them further down the road, writes Frederick Cowell (Birkbeck College). The ECHR is not an EU institution; the ECHR was created by the Council of Europe in 1950, the EU’s founding text was the 1957 Treaty of Rome. The Council of Europe has 47 members to the EU’s 27 members and countries such as Norway, Switzerland ..read more

As the clock ticks down to 31 December 2020, the UK government has repeatedly invoked the concept of ‘sovereignty’ to explain the UK’s reluctance to enter into an FTA with the EU. In this blog, Clair Gammage and Phil Syrpis (University of Bristol Law School) explore the contradictions of navigating the post-Brexit world as a ‘sovereign’ state for the UK. We are, by now, all too familiar with the language of ‘take back control’ and ‘Global Britain’ – rhetoric that is rooted in a particular understanding of sovereignty. However, the justificatory use of the concept of sovereignty to reject aspe ..read more