(Adds details, judge’s quotes)
BELFAST, Dec 15 (Reuters) – Northern Ireland’s agriculture minister acted unlawfully in February when he ordered a “politically motivated” halt to post-Brexit checks on food and agricultural goods coming from Britain, Belfast’s High Court ruled on Thursday.
Britain agreed as part of its departure from the European Union to effectively leave Northern Ireland within the bloc’s single market for goods, necessitating checks from January 2021 on some goods coming from the rest of the United Kingdom.
The order to immediately halt those checks 13 months later by then minister Edwin Poots never came into force after the High Court said two days later that they must remain in place, pending the result of a judicial review on the matter.
Judge Adrian Colton said it appeared that the instruction of Poots, a member of the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) that has protested against the checks, was motivated by political rather than legal considerations.
“It’s difficult to draw any conclusion other than that the decision under challenge in this application was an overtly political one taken for political reasons,” Judge Colton said, quashing Poots’ order.
The Northern Ireland protocol was designed to avoid politically contentious checks between Northern Ireland and EU-member Ireland, but many unionists argue the effective border created in the Irish Sea erases part of their British identity.
Judge Colton said Poots’ instruction was consistent with the strategy outlined in a speech by DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson in September 2021 that the party’s ministers would use their votes to frustrate any post-Brexit checks.
He added that Poots previously had clearly accepted that the protocol imposed legal duties on him to carry out the checks and that his officials had been carrying out the checks for over a year before he sought to scrap them.
The British government has sought to ease many of the trade barriers ever since the protocol came into effect and technical talks with the EU on how to do so resumed in October for the first time in seven months. (Reporting by Padraic Halpin in Dublin, additional reporting by Amanda Ferguson in Belfast Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky and Tomasz Janowski)
