News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Friday, April 25, 2025
This has been an intense week in European Union trade policy, with the continuous transatlantic file rolling on, a lot of action in Geneva, the EU and the ACP group finally concluding their post-Cotonou agreement and the European Parliament active on a variety of trade files. MEPs voted to resume …
It’s been an eventful week, dominated by the new EU trade strategy or Trade Policy Review. Below, other important developments…
The European Union will very soon have a revamped ‘enforcement regulation’, a hitherto hardly known legal instrument that allows the bloc to retaliate against countries contravening international trade norms and not cooperating in legal disputes and thus protect itself against ‘appeals into the void’ at the World Trade Organization. The …
Views on what should be included in the coming revamp of a trade ‘enforcement regulation’ tabled by the European Commission late last year are still wide apart.
In a conversation with Borderlex’s Iana Dreyer, MEP Marie-Pierre Vedrenne explains her thinking behind her widely-endorsed report that could turn the EU’s trade retaliatory ‘bazooka’ into something even bigger.
Trade is now a matter for the boxing ring. This is at least the message the press received from an emailed statement of the centre-right European People’s Party office on Monday ahead of a vote on European Union plans to strengthen its legal powers to ‘retaliate’ in the face of …
Today the international trade committee met for a somewhat longer session than the one held at the end of April at the height of Europe’s lockdown. Here some highlights of what’s been said. Pharma intellectual property The pharmaceutical intellectual property space is one to watch very closely post COVID-19. It …
Council members agreed to temporarily bury the hatchet on a regulatory proposal tabled by the European Commission that aims to empower it to take ‘retaliatory’ trade measures should a World Trade Organization counterpart block litigation proceedings. The EU is bent on making sure it can continue to use a two-tier …
If you expected a rapid-reaction ‘big bazooka’ coming out of the European Commission to respond to the current Appellate Body impasse and allow the EU to ‘defend its interests’ as soon as this year – then you forgot that you were in the EU. When the capitals are divided – …
Did you expect the European Union to quickly come up with a revamped ‘enforcement regulation’ ? Don’t hold your breath. France, among others, wants this to become a bigger piece of legislation than originally envisaged by the European Commission.
