ECJ Advocate General Says EU Commission Cannot Make Trade Deals Without Member States 21/12/2016 by Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch Not all parts of the European Union-Singapore trade agreement “fall within the EU’s exclusive competence and therefore the agreement cannot be concluded without the participation of all of the Member States.” This is the result of an opinion of the European Court of Justice Advocate General Eleanor Sharpston published today. The Singapore Free Trade Agreement can only be concluded by the European Union and the member states acting jointly, according to the decision which clearly divides issues that fall under EU competency compared to such that need member states acting as well. No EU compentency exists, for example, for “provisions relating to the non-commercial aspects of intellectual property rights,” according to a press release of the court. The decision might influence future trade agreement negotiations of the European Union in general, as most of the time the provisions negotiated do include subjects from both lists, those falling under member state competency and those falling under the competency of the European Commission. The full text of the opinion is available here. A court press release is available here [pdf]. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window) Related "ECJ Advocate General Says EU Commission Cannot Make Trade Deals Without Member States" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.