Insight
Brexit and police and judicial co-operation: Too little, too late? by Camino Mortera-Martinez 9 November 2020
The EU and the UK will find an agreement on extradition and Europol. But both parties are further apart on data protection than it may seem. Data transfers will be a problem in the future relationship. Three and a half years ago the CER published the first in a series of pieces on Brexit and EU justice and home affairs (JHA). Post-Brexit JHA co-operation was a neglected issue then. Unfortunately the political and media debate, almost exclusively focused on whether the EU and UK will agree a trade deal by the end of the year, still largely ignores the subject. For all the drama and the millions of words devoted to tariffs, rules of origin or electric batteries, few people are thinking about what will happen if the UK and the EU cannot agree on police and judicial co-operation. There are several reasons for this: perhaps the most obvious is that justice and home affairs is a complex, technical field. But that is also true of trade policy. And yet, even the minutiae of a prospective trade agreement have been covered by the media over the past few months. More convincing is the argument that unlike their visions for the future trade relationship, EU and British positions on the matter of JHA co-operation have changed very little since the Brexit vote. While the British Parliament pondered what sort of economic relationship it wanted to have with the EU, the UK’s red lines on police and judicial co-operation have barely moved since Theresa May’s 2017 Lancaster House speech. The same is true for the European Union. Even back then, three things were clear: the UK wanted a ‘bespoke’ agreement with the EU, but rejected the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ); the EU’s negotiators insisted that a non-EU country, however important as a security partner, should not have more rights and fewer obligations than a member-state (or even a non-EU member of the EU’s passport-free Schengen area); and both parties wanted an agreement to cover three priorities: access to databases, extradition and co-operation with EU agencies like Europol. None of these things have changed since 2017.
CER INSIGHT: Brexit and police and judicial co-operation: Too little, too late? 9 November 2020
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