European Parliament | @Europarl
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The plenary session of the European Parliament (EP) will vote on the ratification of the trade and cooperation agreement between the European Union and the United Kingdom next Tuesday, April 27, after four months of scrutiny of a text agreed on the evening of Christmas Eve between the negotiators. from London and Brussels.
The 705 MEPs will debate the matter on Tuesday morning and then vote on the trade and cooperation agreement with the United Kingdom, which has been provisionally applied from 1 January, as well as a non-legislative resolution on the matter.
Due to the pandemic, many MEPs vote remotely and the result would not be known until early Wednesday morning, parliamentary sources said.
The parliamentary committees responsible for the agreement – those of International Trade and Foreign Affairs – have already approved the text and recommended its ratification last Thursday, but it was pending that the plenary session as a whole set a date to give the final consent of the Camera.
Although the pact was achieved on Christmas Eve 2020, at that time the European Parliament did not want to make an accelerated revision of the text (as the United Kingdom did) and argued that it needed time to do so, a procedure recognized by the community treaties.
For this reason, the agreement was not fully ratified and from January 1, 2021 (first day with the United Kingdom completely disconnected from the EU) it has been applied provisionally.
However, this temporary period expires at the end of this month after an extension of two months and, if Parliament had not ratified the text before that date, the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union would automatically be governed by the basic terms of the World Trade Organization (WTO), much less favorable than what was agreed between the two after months of negotiations.
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