The EU Parliament's Trade Committee has decided on Monday to postpone approval of the trade agreement with the US. The EU Parliament has announced this. The decision comes after US President Donald Trump announced new tariffs over the weekend.
The EU Parliament was otherwise supposed to have voted on the agreement on Tuesday. This was seen as an important step towards normalising trade relations with the US. The trade agreement is only finally approved by the EU when the parliament has given the green light.
However, the EU Parliament's decision does not indicate that the EU is about to leave the agreement. Both the EU Commission and the EU countries still stand behind the agreement, which was concluded by the President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, at a meeting with US President Donald Trump in Scotland last summer.
However, all three EU institutions are calling for clarity on whether the US is about to break the agreement.
This comes in the wake of the US Supreme Court ruling on Friday, by a vote of six to three, that Trump did not have the authority to impose the global tariffs that shook global trade last year. Trump's reaction to the Supreme Court ruling was to take the tariff hammer out of the drawer once again.
He first announced a global tariff of ten percent on imported goods, before stating on Saturday that he would raise the tariff to 15 percent. This prompted the chairman of the EU Parliament's trade committee, Bernd Lange, to propose suspending the implementation of the EU's customs agreement with the US, because it is unclear whether the US will still comply with it.
- Before further steps can be taken, we need clarity and legal certainty, said Lange, a member of the EU Parliament from Germany, on Sunday, according to the German news agency dpa.
That is the proposal that Lange has now received support for in the EU Parliament's trade committee.
Christel Schaldemose is not surprised
This does not surprise the vice-chairman of the EU Parliament, Danish Christel Schaldemose, who had spoken to several members of the EU Parliament prior to the meeting in the trade committee who pointed to a postponement.
- I generally think that we should be someone you can count on. So when we have reached an agreement, we should keep it. But the other side doesn't.
- So it's fair enough to just pause the agreement while we find out what's up and down in this, said Christel Schaldemose on Monday ahead of the meeting in the trade committee.
No new date has been set for the vote on approving the trade agreement with the US, the European Parliament says.
This means that the parliament can wait until there is clarity before putting the agreement to a vote again.
/ritzau/
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