Mr. Rupert Schlegelmilch:

First, member states will obviously have to take responsibility to ratify this agreement. We cannot prejudge what Ireland will do, but under international rules we are expected to follow up if we sign a treaty and commit ourselves. The credibility of the EU is ultimately at stake if we do not actually go ahead and deal with the issue, let us put it like that.

On the question of whether we can have an outside ISDS, there are models where these things have been separated at a later stage, which also keeps clear how the competency was divided between member states and the EU. However, on this particular point, when we negotiated CETA that was not so clear. We followed an inclusive approach for a long time and kept these agreements in one legal Act. The answer is that while it is clear there is no time limit for ratification we should, as a credible international actor, ratify the agreement. In a way, the model we will probably apply in the future, which is to have these as separate legal instruments, is not an option in this particular case because the whole agreement would have to be renegotiated and the whole process started from the beginning. That would also be seen by our Canadian partner as going back on something we have studiously negotiated for a long number of years.