Agreement Eu Singapore

The EU and Singapore meet regularly to discuss issues and best practices in implementing the agreement. Committees meet regularly. Effects of the agreement for each Member State: Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, Singapore will remove all remaining tariffs on EU products under the trade agreement. The agreement also offers new opportunities for EU service providers, particularly in areas such as telecommunications, environmental services, engineering, IT and shipping. It will also make the business environment more predictable. The agreement will also provide legal protection for 138 iconic European food and beverage products known as geographical indications. Singapore is already the third destination for this kind of European specialties. Singapore has also expressed its readiness to remove trade barriers in addition to tariffs in key sectors, such as recognising EU safety tests for cars and many electronic devices or accepting labels used by EU textile companies. The agreement is expected to be the first free trade agreement with a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the third with an Asian country after South Korea and Japan from the EU`s point of view. Singapore is the EU`s 14th largest trading partner. The Commission began discussions with the hope of a quick conclusion by the end of 2011, given that Singapore has already concluded a number of free trade agreements – notably with the United States, China, Japan and India – and that it is a free port with relatively low tariffs and regulatory barriers. According to an opinion of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg, the initial AEE was a so-called joint agreement. The opinion was requested by the European Commission, which asked whether the EU institutions were the only ones entitled to conclude the agreement without the Member States being contracting parties.

[8] The Court`s opinion led the European Commission to divide the agreement into a free trade agreement and an investment protection agreement. The Commission considers the scale of liberalisation of services to be a new benchmark for the EU. It also describes it as the first green free trade agreement and states that it is in line with the ue 2020 strategy`s objective of promoting green growth and contains commitments on environmental services, environmental criteria and illegal logging. The timetable for implementing the agreement would be different for both sides: Singapore would immediately lift import duties, while the EU would last five years. This is the EU`s second free trade agreement in Asia; the first – along with South Korea – came into force in July 2011. On 19 October 2018, three agreements were signed between the parties, the EU-Singapore trade agreement, the EU-Singapore Investment Protection Agreement and the Framework Partnership and Cooperation Agreement. [5] [6] The agreement was approved by the European Parliament on 13 February 2019. [7] On November 8, 2019, it was announced that the agreement will enter into force on November 21, 2019.