European Commission to take legal action against UK over protocol Bill

The European Commission will on Wednesday launch new legal actions against Britain in response to the introduction of a Bill to unilaterally scrap the Northern Ireland protocol.

The infringement actions will be for breaching the protocol by not providing the EU with Northern Ireland trade statistics and failing to perform food and animal safety checks set out in the agreement, The Irish Times has learned.

European Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic will also announce the unfreezing of an infringement action against Britain over failure to implement rules on the movement of parcels and pets from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. This action was paused last year in an effort to improve the atmosphere in negotiations about changing how the protocol is implemented.

The EU’s move comes as Jeffrey Donaldson has shrugged off pressure from the British government to restore the Stormont institutions in response to the publication of the Bill. Speaking at Westminster a day after the legislation was introduce, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader said there was no timetable for his party to go back into the Executive.

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“We haven’t completed our initial assessment of the legislation. We want to do that and then we’ll talk to the government about where we go from here,” he said.

“There’s a long way to go with this legislation. It will take months to pass through the Commons and the Lords unless the government decides to escalate the timetable for the Bill, and we haven’t heard that. So we will consider what happens in the legislative process, but at this stage we haven’t come to a view as to when the institutions might be restored. We want that to happen but we need to be sure that this Bill is moving forward, and that this Bill will be enacted.”

The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill would give British ministers the power to override central elements of the agreement Boris Johnson negotiated with the European Union in 2019. If they determine there is a risk to political or economic stability, ministers would be able to revoke all of the protocol apart from provisions covering the Common Travel Area, North-South co-operation and human rights protection.

Mr Donaldson said he believed the Bill had the potential to provide a solution for the problems unionists have identified with the protocol. But he rejected the suggestion that the British government was pandering to the DUP by introducing the legislation.

“The idea that this Bill has suddenly been produced, plucked out of the sky, to satisfy the needs of any particular party or faction is simply wrong,” he said.

“I recognise that it is an attempt by the government to address the problems created by the protocol, to restore political and economic stability in Northern Ireland. I don’t believe and I do not subscribe to the view of some that this Bill is simply about pandering to this one, or that one.”

Earlier, foreign secretary Liz Truss urged the DUP to “get on with” restoring the Stormont institutions, telling the BBC that “people deserve to have a government”.