Former EFTA lawyer says bill defies EEA agreement premise

A bill on Protocol 35 appears to disregard a key premise behind the EEA Agreement, former EFTA legal department lawyer Tryggvi Axelsson says in an opinion article published by mbl.is.

Axelsson says fundamental questions arise over whether the bill is consistent with democratic accountability and Alþingi’s duty to pass laws under Icelandic constitutional law. When the EEA Agreement was negotiated, he says, the EFTA states clearly considered that EU legal provisions could not be given direct effect or precedence.

In his view, enacting the bill in its current form would disregard those premises. EEA states have a duty to actively implement the agreement, he says, but adopting a priority rule without properly assessing its long-term consequences would amount to “irreversible haste” in relation to Iceland’s constitution and the will of the parties to the EEA Agreement.

Sigríður Á. Andersen, chair of the Centre Party parliamentary group, also discusses Protocol 35 in an opinion column. She says she asked whether Iceland’s EEA counterparts had complained about the country’s implementation of the protocol, but found no one who knew of such a complaint.

According to Andersen, neither the EU, individual EU member states nor the other EFTA countries in the EEA have complained about Iceland’s handling of Protocol 35 since 1993. She says ESA is therefore dealing with a complaint that was never made.