Six founding member states demand earliest start to Brexit process, but they cannot compel UK to invoke article 50
EU governments have piled pressure on the UK to leave the union as soon as possible, saying talks on the exit must begin promptly and urging that a new British prime minister is installed quickly.As Europe scrambled on Saturday to limit the damage from the momentous Brexit vote, however, there seemed little it could immediately do to force Britain to speed up the pace of its departure from the 60-year-old bloc.
Meeting for emergency talks in Berlin, foreign ministers from the EU’s six founding member states demanded the earliest possible start to the Brexit process.
France’s foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said Britain must trigger article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, the procedure for leaving the EU.
There was “a certain urgency”, Ayrault said after the meeting with his counterparts from Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, adding that David Cameron should step aside soon for a new leader to manage the transition out of the union.
“A new prime minister must be designated, that will take a few days,” he said, adding that it would “not be respectful” to delay the process.
On Friday, Cameron had said he would delay the start of Brexit negotiations until his successor was in place in the autumn.
The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said the ministers “join together in saying that this process must begin as soon as possible, so we don’t end up in an extended limbo period”.
Steinmeier told a press conference at the German foreign ministry guesthouse on the outskirts of Berlin that Cameron had a “responsibility beyond the UK” to initiate formal steps for Britain’s exit and “give us a chance to engage with the European Union’s future … we call on Britain to trigger article 50 as soon as possible.”
Earlier, the president of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, said the British had voted to leave and “it doesn’t make any sense to wait until October to try to negotiate the terms of their departure”.
Juncker, who said Britain’s departure would not be “an amicable divorce” but observed it was never “a tight love affair anyway”, said he would “like to get started immediately”.
Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, said he hoped “we won’t get into a cat and mouse game over this. That would neither be fitting for Britain nor theEuropean Union.”
Emmanuel Macron, the French economy minister, said at a Paris debate on Europe that the top priority was to arrange a “smooth, rapid and very well-organised” UK exit, adding: “We have to be organised, and we don’t have to wait for months and months. Now we need a quick fix on this situation.”
In Brussels, the office of Donald Tusk, president of the European council, said Didier Seeuws, a Belgian aide to Tusk’s predecessor, Herman Van Rompuy, would head the union’s taskforce to negotiate Britain’s exit from the union and had started on the preparatory work.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, speaking separately at a news conference in Potsdam, saidit “shouldn’t take forever” for Britain to deliver formal notification that it wants to leave the EU, but she “would not fight over a short period of time”.
Making it clear that the matter was ultimately in London’s hands, Merkel said there was “no need to be particularly nasty in any way in the negotiations. They must be conducted properly.”
Much as the EU might like Britain to go fast, there are few legal means to compel it to start the process of leaving.
“There is no mechanism to compel a state to withdraw from the European Union,” said Kenneth Armstrong, professor of European law at Cambridge University.
“Article 50 is there to allow withdrawal, but no other party has the right to invoke article 50, no other state or institution. While delay is highly undesirable politically, legally there is nothing that can compel a state to withdraw.”
Article 7 of the Lisbon treaty can be used to suspend a member state for breaching fundamental EU rights, but it is considered a “nuclear option”, and Britain has done nothing to warrant it.
The shock waves from Thursday’s vote continue to spread, having already driven sterling down to its lowest level for 30 years and wiping more than $2tn (£1.5tn) from the value of world stock markets.
Britain’s European commissioner, Jonathan Hill, announced on Saturday that he would resign, saying he did not “believe it is right that I should carry on as the British commissioner as though nothing had happened”.
Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, was expected in Paris to meet the French president, François Hollande, who said on Saturday that Europe had to offer people “a perspective” in the face of mounting populism.
“It is always easier to unmake than make, but the consequences are extremely serious,” he said on a visit to the eastern French city of Colmar.
The flurry of diplomatic activity came ahead of a key meeting in Berlin on Monday between Merkel, Hollande, Renzi and Tusk.
The EU’s 28 commissioners are also due to meet on Monday, in Brussels, with a two-day summit of national leaders following on Tuesday and Wednesday.
With Euroscepticism on the rise across the continent, many have said the Brexit vote must be seen as a wake-up call for a union increasingly losing touch with its people.
Cameron will attend the first day of the summit and is expected to explain Britain’s position at a dinner on Tuesday evening. He will then return to London and will not take part in the second day of the proceedings, according to Tusk’s invitation letter released on Friday night.
Cameron’s position is that it would be up to his successor, expected to be appointed before the Conservative party conference in October, to trigger article 50. Once that is done, the clock starts running on two years of negotiations.
Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London and a leading leave campaigner, said there should be “no haste” in the preparations for the exit of Britain, the first sovereign country to vote to leave the union.
The president of the European parliament, Martin Schulz, told the Guardian that EU lawyers were studying whether it was possible to speed up the triggering of article 50.
He said it was difficult to accept that “a whole continent is taken hostage because of an internal fight in the Tory party”, adding that he doubted the timing of article 50 was down to the UK alone.
“We have to take note of this unilateral declaration that they want to wait until October, but that must not be the last word,” he said. – World News Report
via EIN News
