LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government will present legislation to parliament on Monday to unilaterally revise the post-Brexit trade arrangements for Northern Ireland.
The order paper for the House of Commons said Foreign Secretary Liz Truss would present a bill to set out how the terms included in the Northern Ireland protocol would be defined in domestic law.
The move risks damaging relations between London and Brussels.
Johnson agreed to the protocol in 2019 to allow Britain to leave the EU’s single market and customs union without controls being re-imposed on the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, vital to the 1998 Good Friday peace deal that ended three decades of violence.
By striking such a deal, he effectively agreed to a customs border between the British-run province of Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. Britain now says the protocol is unworkable, and months of talks with the EU have failed to find any solutions.
(Reporting by Kate Holton; editing by William James)
