‘Downgrade’ of EU’s UK mission a risk to Irish ‘Brexit monitoring’
UK PRIME MINISTER Boris Johnson’s refusal to grant full diplomatic status to a new EU embassy in London risks harming Ireland’s Brexit monitoring.
Irish diplomat Nicole Mannion is the legation’s deputy ambassador – an appointment deemed “a quiet diplomatic coup by Dublin” ahead of Brexit.
The embassy was opened in the wake of Brexit and is aimed at helping to frame a new relationship between the UK and the EU. Ms Mannion last autumn moved from her previous job in the Department of Foreign Affairs, where she had worked at Ireland’s London embassy monitoring the impact of Brexit.
Her appointment in the number two slot at the new EU embassy was aimed at maximising information flows on the detailed impact of the “Brexit small print” on Irish trade and other interests.
The refusal to grant it full embassy status has been criticised as “petty and vindictive” by many Brussels officials.
But the UK appears to be digging in on its decision and the British government argues that the EU is more like an international organisation rather than a sovereign nation.
This view has been rejected by EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier, among others.
London has appointed Lindsay Croisdale-Appleby, who was previously its deputy chief negotiator in Brexit trade talks, as head of its new diplomatic mission in Brussels.
The EU diplomatic delegation is based at Smith Square in the heart of London’s political and administrative area of Westminster.
The building was previously the headquarters of the British Conservative Party and longtime prime minister Margaret Thatcher often waved at crowds of supporters from its windows after her election wins.
In an another ironic footnote, Ms Mannion’s new boss, EU Ambassador to London,
Joao Vale de Almeida, was previously a Commission press spokesman in Brussels.
In that job he dealt directly with Mr Johnson when he was a journalist in Brussels in the early 1990s.
Status
Brussels diplomats argue that the British decision contrasts with 142 other countries around the world where the EU has delegations and where its ambassadors are all granted the same diplomatic status.
It is also a change from UK policy from 2010, when it was agreed the EU foreign service should have “privileges and immunities equivalent to those referred to in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 18 April 1961”.
The EU fears that hostile states might copy the UK and downgrade the protections granted to EU diplomats.
This could open EU diplomats up to being more easily harassed and expelled.
Former US president Donald Trump also downgraded the EU’s ambassador to the US, Irishman David O’Sullivan, in this way, although that decision was quietly reversed last year.