{"id":7,"date":"2021-05-20T08:05:20","date_gmt":"2021-05-20T07:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/EUatOU\/?p=7"},"modified":"2021-05-18T17:18:55","modified_gmt":"2021-05-18T16:18:55","slug":"some-useful-legal-concepts-for-understanding-the-tca-wa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/EUatOU\/index.php\/2021\/05\/20\/some-useful-legal-concepts-for-understanding-the-tca-wa\/","title":{"rendered":"Some useful legal concepts for understanding the TCA\/WA"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned last week<\/a>, the focus so far on the Trade & Cooperation Agreement (and, to a lesser extent, the Withdrawal Agreement) has been on the legal aspects.<\/p>\n

Part of that has been driven by the growing realisation among non-legal scholars (like me) that there’s not merely a need to read the fine print of the treaties, but also to have a sense of wider legal frameworks and principles.<\/p>\n

With that in mind, I’m found myself coming back to such questions at regular intervals in the past 18 months.<\/p>\n

In this post, I’m going to pull them together for you (and for me), so you have quicker access and so we can start thinking about their interaction.<\/p>\n

Pacta sunt servanda and force majeure<\/h2>\n

Tellingly, much of what I’ll cover relates to the extent of obligation that a party enters into by signing a treaty. In part, that’s a function of the apparent lack of understanding on the side of various ministers in their pronouncements on the TCA\/WA, but also connects back to the fundamental failure of the UK to determine what it actually wants from Brexit.<\/p>\n

I’ve explored the latter point at length in various other places (like here<\/a>), but a consequence of not really knowing what you want to achieve is that once you have an agreement you may well discover down the line that it’s not what you wanted.<\/p>\n

The central legal concept that applies here is that of\u00a0pacta sunt servanda<\/em>: if you sign up to it, you’re stuck with it (roughly speaking).<\/p>\n

I cover the main points in this thread<\/a> and these slides:<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"

PDF version: https:\/\/bit.ly\/UshGraphic40<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

The concept contains a lot (as you can see) across all the stages of international agreements, so it pays some time to unpack it all.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it provides the basic framework for the current discussion about\u00a0force majeure<\/em> that we’ve been seeing around the Northern Ireland Protocol. While I did make a graphic about that too, in essence you have much of the idea from the stuff above:<\/p>\n

\"\"

PDF version: https:\/\/bit.ly\/UshGraphic80<\/a>
Thread: here<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

<\/h2>\n

And as a final thing, I now have a mirror of this blog running at the OU<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned last week, the focus so far on the Trade & Cooperation Agreement (and, to a lesser extent, the Withdrawal Agreement) has been on the legal aspects. Part of that has been driven by the growing realisation among … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,9,8,3,6,7],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-brexit","tag-force-majeure","tag-pacta-sunt-servanda","tag-trade-cooperation-agreement","tag-uk","tag-withdrawal-agreement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/EUatOU\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/EUatOU\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/EUatOU\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/EUatOU\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/EUatOU\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/EUatOU\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/EUatOU\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/8"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/EUatOU\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/EUatOU\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/EUatOU\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}