Britain and EU Clear Way for Brexit Talks to Proceed
December 8, 2017 by admin
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But a deal was worked out overnight, and Mr. Juncker said the commission was satisfied that “sufficient progress” has been made in three areas:
• The question of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. A spokesman for the Irish government said, “This is a very good day for Ireland, North and South.”
• A financial settlement, frequently referred to as a divorce bill. Mrs. May had already roughly doubled her original financial offer to the bloc, to pay for commitments made while Britain was a member.
• The rights of British and European Union citizens. There are three million citizens of the bloc in Britain and one million Britons in the union, and their fate had emerged as a sticking point.
While negotiators managed to finesse the Irish border issue to reach this agreement, the matter seemed far from settled. It will now go to trade negotiators, and Prime Minister Leo Varadkar of Ireland noted approvingly that there was now a “backstop arrangement,” in case they do not resolve the issue.
Under that deliberately ambiguous formulation, Northern Ireland and perhaps all of the United Kingdom would maintain “full alignment” with European rules as needed to “support North-South cooperation, the all-island economy and the protection of the 1998 Agreement” that ended the Troubles in the North.
The haziness surrounding the arrangement was cause for concern for Ms. Foster and the Democratic Unionist Party, who are determined above all to avoid a situation in which the rules governing Northern Ireland diverge from those for the rest of the United Kingdom. That direction, they fear, would ultimately lead to reunification with the South.
So, while welcoming the idea there would be no “red line,” or border, running through the Irish Sea, Ms. Foster said in a statement, “We cautioned the prime minister about proceeding with this agreement in its present form, given the issues which still need to be resolved and the views expressed to us by many of her own party colleagues.”
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But that snag, should it develop at all, lies in the future, while Friday was portrayed as a day for celebration, however muted by recognition of the hard road ahead.
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“This is a difficult negotiation but we have now made a first breakthrough,” Mr. Juncker said in a statement. “I am satisfied with the fair deal we have reached with the United Kingdom. If the 27 member states agree with our assessment, the European Commission and our chief negotiator Michel Barnier stand ready to begin work on the second phase of the negotiations immediately.”
The heads of the member states will meet next week and are expected to confirm the deal next Friday.
“This government will continue to govern in the interests of the whole community in Northern Ireland and uphold the agreements that have underpinned the huge progress that has been made over the past two decades,” Mrs. May said in a statement on the British government’s website.
With the 2019 deadline fast approaching, Mrs. May has been under growing pressure to make progress. Opponents have criticized the way she has conducted the negotiations, and British businesses have been increasingly anxious to know what rules will apply after British withdrawal, known as Brexit.
Mrs. May, who lost her parliamentary majority in elections earlier this year, has been assailed by numerous problems at home, where her cabinet is deeply divided over Brexit policy and two ministers were recently forced to quit over separate issues.
Although supporters of Brexit once insisted that Britain held all the cards in the withdrawal negotiations, it has been Mrs. May who has made nearly all the concessions.
Assuming that European Union leaders agree at their summit meeting in Brussels to proceed, detailed trade negotiations will begin soon, probably early in the new year. There will also be talks on a transition period, which Mrs. May wants to run for two years, during which very little will change as business gets ready for a new set of rules.
Time is short. In March, Mrs. May triggered Article 50 of the European Union’s treaty, which lays down a two-year timetable to forge an exit agreement. That can only be extended with the agreement of all member nations.
A trade and transition agreement will have to be concluded well before March 2019 — probably by the fall of 2018 — in order to provide time for it to be ratified by member nations and by the European Parliament. Most trade experts believe that it will only be possible to agree on an outline trade deal next year, and that negotiations will be extended into the transition period.
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The tight time span is not Mrs. May’s only problem. Her cabinet has yet to agree on its ultimate objectives for Brexit, particularly the extent to which Britain would continue to adopt the standards and rules of the European Union, its neighbor and biggest trading partner.
“While being satisfied with this agreement, which is obviously the personal success of Prime Minister Theresa May, let us remember that the most difficult challenge is still ahead,” said Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council. “We all know that breaking up is hard, but breaking up and building a new relation is much harder.”
Mrs. May’s colleagues are split between those who want to remain close to the bloc, to minimize the disruption to trade, and hard-line supporters of Brexit, like the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson. He wants Britain to be able to adopt its own rules and regulations and to be free to strike new free trade deals with non-European nations around the globe.
In a speech in September in Florence, Mrs. May said that while Britain would leave the customs union and single market, she wanted a much deeper free trade agreement than the one the European Union negotiated with Canada. Officials with the bloc insist that Britain cannot be outside the bloc’s main economic structures and still receive the same type of market access as those on the inside.
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What country is Jerusalem in? Trump’s proclamation avoids some thorny questions
December 8, 2017 by admin
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President Donald Trump declared Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Trump’s announcement. But Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Trump’s shift signals U.S. withdrawal from being a peace mediator. (Dec. 6)
AP
WASHINGTON — President Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on Wednesday — but on Thursday, State Department officials stopped short of saying whether the U.S. believes that the city Jerusalem is actually in Israel.
That seemingly contradictory policy demonstrates just how difficult it will be for the Trump administration to implement what the president called a “recognition of reality.”
Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem upended decades of American foreign policy, delighted conservatives in both countries, ignited protests in the West Bank and cast the future of peace talks into doubt.
But it also left any number of political, diplomatic and practical issues unresolved: How will U.S. passports identify people born in Jerusalem? How will the city appear on maps? What’s the future of the Consulate General in Jerusalem? And where will the U.S. pay for and build a new embassy in a city where historic, political and security considerations so often intersect?
More: Why declaring Jerusalem as Israel’s capital may upend peace in Middle East
More: Trump’s Jerusalem plan signals to Palestinians — the less you give up, the more you lose
All those questions may be beside the point.
“It’s pretty clear the embassy is not going to move to Jerusalem in the foreseeable future, so it’s a moot point for the time being,” said James B. Cunningham, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and a fellow at the Atlantic Council. “The political situation will outrun the technical details of how to move the embassy in the long run.”
For now, State Department officials said, there will be no practical change in how the U.S. deals with the status of Jerusalem.
A 2015 Supreme Court decision, for example, upheld the longstanding practice of omitting the country on passports for people born in Jerusalem, effectively giving it a stateless status. That won’t change, officials said.
“There has been no change in our policy with respect to consular practice or passport issuance at this time,” said acting Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield on Thursday. U.S. government maps also won’t change for now, he said.
“The president’s decision speaks for itself,” he said. “He didn’t go beyond that, and I’m not going to go beyond that.”
While Israel sees Jerusalem as its undivided and ”eternal” capital, the Palestinians also claim east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. Previous presidents have said that the decision on Jerusalem’s capital must come from a negotiated agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians.
But even after Trump’s decisive foreign policy pronouncement, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert declined to say what country Jerusalem is in.
“What country was the president in when he prayed at the Western Wall?” an Associated Press reporter asked.
“We’re not taking any position on the overall boundaries. We are recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” Nauert responded. ”There are some questions that you will rightfully have about passports, for example, about maps. Some of those things, we are still working out.”
More: Jerusalem has history of many conquests, surrenders
More: Palestinian leader: Trump’s Jerusalem decision a ‘withdrawal’ of peace process
Another question: Whether the president’s directive to move the embassy can be completed during his presidency.
“We are not going to be doing that quickly,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Thursday in Austria. “We have to acquire a site. We have to develop building plans. We’ll have to construct the building. So this is not something that will happen overnight.”
The two most comparable embassies now under construction — in Beirut, Lebanon and Islamabad, Pakistan — are expected to cost more than $1 billion each. They also take years to build: The Beirut embassy broke ground in 2011 and is scheduled to open next year. Construction on the Islamabad embassy started last year and isn’t expected to be completed until 2022.
That doesn’t include two or three years of site selection and design before construction can begin. Finding a site for the embassy will also have the effect of taking the position that the embassy — wherever it’s located — is in Israeli territory. But the U.S. position remains that the borders of that territory are still to be resolved by negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.
“Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. And all of the other aspects – boundaries of sovereignty – we’re not taking a position. It’s for the sides to resolve,” Satterfield said.
An embassy move could also complicate consular relations with the Palestinian territories. A consulate general in Jerusalem — located on the “green line” that marks the pre-1967 borders of Israel and Palestine — serves as a de facto mission to the Palestinian Authority, and is almost completely independent from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.
Closing or combining that facility would treat Israel and Palestinian territories as one state. Leaving it open would effectively put two separate U.S. missions in Jerusalem.
Even if the embassy moved, Cunningham said, the U.S. would likely retain some presence in Tel Aviv. The facility houses about 1,000 diplomatic staff, plus Homeland Security, Defense Department and FBI personnel. The Israeli Ministry of Defense is headquartered there, as is every other foreign embassy. And there’s a beachfront ambassador’s residence on the north side of Tel Aviv.
Could the U.S. ambassador could even choose to live in Tel Aviv and commute to Jerusalem?
“That’s a very interesting question,” said Cunningham, a career diplomat who served as ambassador in Tel Aviv in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. ”It’s a really nice residence.”
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