CELS Lunchtime Seminar: 'EU Environmental Law, Brexit and the Future of UK Trade Agreements'

Speaker: Dr Markus Gehring, University of Cambridge 

Title: "EU Environmental Law, Brexit and the Future of UK Trade Agreements"

Brexit and environmental law constitutes one of the more challenging areas of the divorce negotiations by the United Kingdom. In many ways, EU environmental law developed organically in areas where EU member states felt that common standards would be useful because differing standards would have a direct effect on the internal market. It is also one of the areas that was decisively shaped by the United Kingdom through the introduction into environmental legislation of market mechanisms previously unknown to the administrative legal systems of civil law that governed continental Europe. As such, this area is perhaps more difficult to negotiate because the expectation would be that the United Kingdom will still trade with the European Union, but perhaps intends to lower its own environmental standards, which would in turn give the United Kingdom a competitive advantage. Unlike regimes in many other areas, some environmentalists have expressed the view that the United Kingdom could perhaps adopt higher and more appropriate standards of protection, in particular in the areas of agriculture and fisheries. However, of course, as the current government has announced a “hard” version of Brexit with no more than perhaps free trade ties to the rest of Europe, deregulatory pressure will be mounting significantly for the time post-Brexit. This talk will examine the state of play of the negotiations and how future cooperation in environmental matters could be salvaged in UK trade agreement. This research draws a current cooperation project on regulatory competition post-Brexit funded by the Cambridge-LMU Munich Initiative and a project for the European Climate Foundation. 

Enquiries to: cels@law.cam.ac.uk