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EU/Turkish Cypriot community
Direct trade regulation: JURI committee sides with Nicosia
By Joanna Sopinska | Wednesday 20 October 2010
After much deliberation, the European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) has rejected the legal basis proposed by the European Commission for a regulation facilitating direct trade with the Turkish Cypriot community. In a report by Kurt Lechner (EPP, Germany), adopted on 18 October, the committee concluded that direct trade with the North of Cyprus - known as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) - is not a question of commercial policy but rather an internal matter that should be governed directly by the Union's single market and customs union rules.
The committee recalled that the whole territory of Cyprus, including the Northern part of the island, is part and parcel of EU customs territory and therefore the movement of goods there should not be regulated on the basis of trade policy, as proposed in 2004 by the Commission. According to the committee, this would “imply that de facto the line separating the territory of Cyprus would be tantamount to an external border of the Union”. "We need to keep things simple. It is difficult to draft a regulation on the basis of external action and trade policy because Cyprus as a whole is already a member of the EU," commented Lechner.
The JURI committee’s opinion was welcomed by the Cypriot government, which described it as “a positive development”. Nicosia has long questioned the legal basis of the regulation proposed by the European Commission. Due to its opposition, the proposal has never been adopted, as its approval required the unanimous support of all EU member states. After six years, the Commission re-launched, in early March, the adoption procedure of the regulation, but under different rules of procedure.
The Commission decided that following the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, in December 2009, the proposal for the direct trade regulation should fall - as all other trade agreements with third countries - under the co-decision procedure, which implies participation of the European Parliament in the process on equal footing with the Council. Under this procedure, the ultimate approval of the proposal by the Council would not any more require unanimity but rather qualified majority. The Commission’s move has irked Cyprus, which feared that under the new rules the proposal had a chance to be adopted. Nicosia has launched an intensive lobbying campaign against the proposal, with Cypriot Foreign Minister Markos Kyprianou threatening to take the Commission to the EU Court of Justice.
Following the vote, the JURI committee sent, on 19 October, a letter to the Conference of Presidents stating its position. If the Conference of Presidents endorses it (no date has yet been set), the draft regulation will remain solely in the hands of the member states, which have already rejected it in the past.
http://www.europolitics.info/external-p ... 73-44.htmlWow! Let's see where will the threats, lobbying and blackmails of the so-called RoC lead this issue and GC people...
