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Challenge to NI dismissed.

The Supreme Court has thrown out a legal chal­lenge to the deal gov­ern­ing post-Brexit trade in North­ern Ire­land, rul­ing unan­im­ously it did not under­mine the region’s con­sti­tu­tional status as part of the

Brexit

UK. The judg­ment yes­ter­day came after two defeats in lower courts and marks the end of the road for court chal­lenges over the leg­al­ity of the so-called North­ern Ire­land pro­tocol. The Demo­cratic Uni­on­ist party, which has boy­cot­ted the region’s power­shar­ing exec­ut­ive and assembly since May last year, said the rul­ing did not alter its demands for sweep­ing changes to the pro­tocol, which drew a cus­toms bor­der for goods in the Irish Sea. «A solu­tion to the pro­tocol was never going to be found in the courts,» said Sir Jef­frey Don­ald­son, the DUP leader.

«The gov­ern­ment must con­sider this judg­ment, their argu­ments to the court and take the steps neces­sary to replace the pro­tocol with arrange­ments that uni­on­ists can sup­port». They claimed that the pro­tocol was incom­pat­ible with the 1800 Acts of Union’s guar­an­tee that the region should be on the same foot­ing in respect of trade as people in the rest of the UK. They argued the pro­tocol was unlaw­ful under the 1998 North­ern Ire­land Act, the legal found­a­tion for devolved power-shar­ing, and should have been given a cross-com­munity vote. The rul­ing came as talks con­tinue between Lon­don and Brus­sels to find a polit­ical solu­tion to dif­fer­ences over the pro­tocol after months of wrangling.

The UK gov­ern­ment was thus author­ised by the 2020 EU Act to draw up the pro­tocol. Des­pite the defeat, staunch uni­on­ists por­trayed the rul­ing as a vic­tory, accord­ing to Sarah Creighton, a uni­on­ist com­ment­ator and law­yer. 

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