The Withdrawal Agreement and the Dispute Settlement Mechanisms of the European Union

Abstract

In its part 1, this article maps out the dispute settlement mechanisms available to the EU and comment upon their most salient features from the perspective of EU law. In addition to more coercive measures such as sanctions, EU’s international agreements foresee the recourse to judicial or quasi-judicial avenues. This article suggests possible taxonomies of these mechanisms based on the body in charge of setting the dispute, on the procedure, and on the subject matter. In addition to judicial avenues, EU agreements also include “softer” mechanisms for consultation, mediation, or cooperation whereby the parties endeavour to reach a mutually agreed solution for solving any dispute before recurring to judicial avenues. In the light of that discussion, in part 2 it analyses the dispute settlement foreseen for the Withdrawal Agreement concluded between the European Union and the United Kingdom (WA). When considered in relation to other EU international agreements, the WA is highly distinctive in its judicial forms of dispute settlement because it stems from a highly distinctive circumstance.

Keywords: Brexit, Dispute settlement, Non-Judicial Avenues, Northern Ireland Protocol, Withdrawal Agreement