Another position paper, this time on civil judicial cooperation after Brexit was published yesterday and reported by the BBC (HERE). You can see the paper itself HERE. The government used to talk of ending the jurisdiction of the ECJ in this country. Reaction in the press this morning boils down to accusations of a U turn by the government because of the use of the word "direct" place before jurisdiction in the position paper thus opening the possibility of indirect jurisdiction.
Dominic Raab MP, arch Brexiteer, idiot and putative candidate for Conservative leader (this says more about the state of the party than anything else) faced a lot of questions about this single word on The Today programme this morning. It was not in May's speeches to the party conference last year, or in the famous Lancaster House speech in January and it didn't appear in the White paper on Brexit either. But suddenly here it is. It was put to him that civil servants don't stick words in for no reason but he doggedly argued it didn't mean what everybody else thought it meant.
Dominic Grieve, former attorney general and very widely respected in legal circles has said it is "pie in the sky" to think we can ever be completely independent of the ECJ.
Virtually every newspaper says the government is backtracking. Some seem pleased about it while others like The Telegraph (HERE) are suspicious that it gives the ECJ a backdoor into the British legal system and says the UK, "will be bound by future decisions of the European Court of Justice despite Brexit". Raab said other people had accused the ECJ of being "predatory" and "inimical" to British law and values but as usual gave no examples.
The ECJ is all too frequently mixed up with the ECHR - the human rights court based in Strasbourg but nothing at all to do with the EU. It seems to me that like trade, we are now entering negotiations on something to resolve a problem that for most people didn't exist before the last year or so and where we will end up more or less where we are now.
Dominic Raab MP, arch Brexiteer, idiot and putative candidate for Conservative leader (this says more about the state of the party than anything else) faced a lot of questions about this single word on The Today programme this morning. It was not in May's speeches to the party conference last year, or in the famous Lancaster House speech in January and it didn't appear in the White paper on Brexit either. But suddenly here it is. It was put to him that civil servants don't stick words in for no reason but he doggedly argued it didn't mean what everybody else thought it meant.
Dominic Grieve, former attorney general and very widely respected in legal circles has said it is "pie in the sky" to think we can ever be completely independent of the ECJ.
Virtually every newspaper says the government is backtracking. Some seem pleased about it while others like The Telegraph (HERE) are suspicious that it gives the ECJ a backdoor into the British legal system and says the UK, "will be bound by future decisions of the European Court of Justice despite Brexit". Raab said other people had accused the ECJ of being "predatory" and "inimical" to British law and values but as usual gave no examples.
The ECJ is all too frequently mixed up with the ECHR - the human rights court based in Strasbourg but nothing at all to do with the EU. It seems to me that like trade, we are now entering negotiations on something to resolve a problem that for most people didn't exist before the last year or so and where we will end up more or less where we are now.
