The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (FTA) was signed by the EU and the UK on 30 December 2020 after almost ten months of trade negotiations. [25] Three days earlier, Jersey had officially agreed to be included in the agreement to ensure it could continue to trade with Europe without tariffs. Its parliament – the states of Jersey – had until the end of March to properly review the details of the deal. [26] After ratification, Jersey assumed full responsibility for the management of its territorial waters. Any restrictions it imposes on fishing must also apply to jersey and EU vessels. [26] 1. The author notes that Jersey “had in fact negotiated its own contract with France independently of the United Kingdom.” It`s not true. The Granville Bay Agreement 2000 is an international agreement to which both parties are Great Britain and France. Jersey was fully involved in the negotiations of the agreement and was the day-to-day implementer of the agreement, but not a party. Questioned by the European Affairs Committee of the House of Lords, the Ambassador of the European Union to the United Kingdom, João Vale de Almeida, said that the way to resolve the dispute was “the instruments we have created, the bodies we have set up under the Withdrawal Agreement, the specialised joint committees under the Trade and Companies Agreement, a number of committees and working groups” – a governance structure, which he described as “complex” – not unilateral measures. [102] The CCA was initially applied only provisionally until it was applied on the 1st.

May 2021 officially entered into force following the ratification of the agreement by the UK and the EU. [27] A no-deal Brexit could jeopardise data transfers between the UK and Europe. Whatever form the Brexit outcome takes, Jersey has struck deals to ensure it can exchange data with EU members and the UK. In 2018, Jersey passed the Data Protection Act (Jersey) 2018, which ensured that the island maintained an “equivalence standard” with the GDPR to ensure that data could continue to be transferred from the EU to Jersey and vice versa. If an agreement is reached between the UK and the EU and, as expected, the agreement provides for a transition period during which the UK`s agreement with the EU and commitments to the EU will be maintained for a period after Brexit (the transition period), Jersey will not repeal the 1973 Act until the end of the transition period. Crucially, this incident underscores the potential tensions inherent in the relationship a great power may have with its dependent territories. The interests of a state as a whole are not necessarily the same as those of its dependent territories (thus conflicting with the concept of a unitary state in international law) – therefore, in practice, the UK does not conclude international treaties on behalf of Crown possessions without consulting the governments of the respective islands. While Jersey could theoretically have refused to join the trade and cooperation agreement, it would have been politically unwise and economically reckless for an island of just over 100,000 inhabitants to try to negotiate its own separate agreement with the European Union. Although the Crown Dependencies were never part of the bloc, their constitutional relationship with the UK as the state responsible for their international affairs and the economic importance of the European Union in its cross-border trade meant that Jersey`s adoption of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement was almost inevitable. In the week following the protest, MEP Stéphanie Yon-Courtin suggested that the EU could impose economic sanctions by restricting agreements allowing Jersey to sell its financial services to EU citizens and accused Jersey of being a tax haven. She said Jersey should withdraw from the TCA and return to an agreement similar to the previous Granville Bay Treaty that would give French fishermen better access to Jersey`s waters.

[91] 2. Jersey`s introduction of the ATT was not necessarily “almost inevitable”. Jersey has very little cross-border trade with the EU, the UK is by far the largest trading partner. So there is little direct economic gain in being part of the agreement. In addition, there was always the possibility that the final text of the CCA would contain inedible results for CDs (perhaps in fish, but perhaps also in international tax policy), in which case they could have rejected it. At the time of writing, these negotiations were not yet complete. It is possible that no future relationship or even a trade agreement will be concluded and that the UK and the EU will not act on simpler and less favourable WTO terms. This result is called The No Further Negotiated Outcome (NFNO). Following the UK`s withdrawal from the EU on 31 January 2020, there was a one-year transition period during which EU law continued to apply to the UK. .