Lord Butler of Brockwell – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Butler of Brockwell on 2016-04-14.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many treaties to which the UK is a party would have to be renegotiated if the UK were to leave the EU.

Baroness Anelay of St Johns

The process of withdrawing from the EU is untested and would contain numerous elements depending on the outcome of the negotiations with the rest of the EU that would follow a notification that the UK had decided to withdraw from the EU. There is little clarity on how this would work, including the number of treaties to which the UK is a party which would need to be renegotiated as a result. There are, for example, free trade agreements covering 53 markets to which the EU is party, which would need to be considered.