Mr. Conor O'Neill:

Currently, under EU law, the primary reason the labelling is there is that, forgetting about this legislation and the proposal here, all member states are required to be able to distinguish between trade with Israel on one hand and trade with the illegal settlements on the other. The reason for that is that the EU has a trade agreement with Israel which guarantees tariff-free access to the EU market. The EU position is that the settlements, of course, are not Israel, so taxes, tariffs and so on must be paid on those goods. In order to do that, every member state has to correctly distinguish between settlement goods and goods from the State of Israel. Further to that, when they are sold in a member state, they have to be labelled correctly as such. That is the same basis that the Government has set out in its legislation to try to make the distinction between them, so those labelling guidelines exist already.