This post first appeared on Ted Folkman’s Letters Blogatory, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary – if you don’t know that blog yet, do check it out, it is rightly called The Blog of International Judicial Assistance. Ted, who has been a guest on this blog, asked me to contribute some thoughts about the future of international judicial assistance (IJA). Ted’s invitation came at a time when I experience, for the first time, a step backwards in that field: The Brexit Deal between the European Union and the United Kingdom, which in my view is a “sectoral hard Brexit” for civil judicial assistance. Continue reading
Happy New Year!
I have no idea know how often I have listened to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, hundreds of times I guess. But it was only today that I accidentally heard the song on the radio and spotted that Billy referred to “vaccine” between “Eisenhower” and “England’s got a new Queen”. At first I thought this was Covid-induced paranoia, but it wasn’t:
It is a reference to Jonas Salk testing his vaccine for polio. As we all know, the vaccine went on to eradicate polio. So on that positive note, I wish all of you a Happy New Year!
Photo:Vicuna R from Germany, Sunset on a cold winter day in Frankfurt (39430220984), CC BY-SA 2.0
Brexit: Council Decision on Members of the EU-UK Arbitration Panel
While the Brexit Deal continues to make headlines, the EU and the UK carry on with the implementation of the institutional Brexit arrangements. The Withdrawal Agreement provides for an EU-UK Arbitration panel to decide disputes between the parties. Yesterday, the Council Decision appointing the members of the panel was published. The title of the document is quite a mouthful, but then it tells you all there is to know about the document, the remainder really is just a list of names: Continue reading
Judicial Cooperation in Civil Matters: Hard Brexit After All?
During the course of the morning, leaked versions of the draft Brexit treaty and accompanying documents started to appear on legal @twitter, only to be followed by the official publications by both the UK government and the EU Commission. I have now had an initial look at what the documents say regarding judicial cooperation in civil matters. Spoiler alert: Radio silence on this topic. Continue reading