Ireland and Germany slam the UK for trying to override Brexit deal

Ireland and Germany have condemned the UK government’s move towards unilaterally rewriting parts of the post-Brexit with the European Union.

Annalena Baerbock, the Foreign minister of Germany, and her Irish counterpart Simon Coveney said there was “no legal or political justification” for overriding the agreed rules in Northern Ireland.

On Sunday, in the British newspaper The Observer, the foreign ministers said the UK would be breaking a two-year-old international agreement which the nation hadn’t engaged in with “good faith.”

The self-styled Northern Ireland Protocol within the deal maintains an open border with EU member and neighbor, Ireland, free of customs ports.

The UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration wants to remove the checks on goods like eggs and meat arriving in Northern Ireland from the rest of Great Britain, which protects the EU’s single market.

British lawmakers in London passed legislation that permits the move last week. Prime Minister Johnson’s opponents, critics, and some members of his party, along with European observers, have said the plan breaks international law. The government argued that the move was justified because of the “genuinely exceptional situation.”

Coveney and Baerbock said the bill wouldn’t fix “challenges” around the protocol. The foreign ministers also stated the UK’s move jeopardizes peace in Northern Ireland under the Good Friday Agreement, which ended the decades of sectarian violence and has stood since 1998.