The UK’s Two Priorities In Geneva Since The EU Referendum

Over the last week the UK Mission in Geneva has advanced a new initiative on patient safety with Germany, Japan and Oman in the WHO; worked with partners in Europe and beyond to table resolutions on Syria, Burma and Somalia in the Human Rights Council; concluded the quadrennial Universal Periodic Review of human rights in the UK; confirmed UK core funding for the next four years linked to reform and results for the UNHCR and other major UN agencies in Geneva; and talked to the European Commission about our future in the WTO.

The UK has had two new priorities in Geneva following last year’s EU Referendum. The first is to establish the UK’s position in the WTO by the time we leave the European Union. And the second is to reassure our friends and partners, through our engagement across Geneva’s multilateral agencies, of the UK’s enduring commitment to the multilateral system.

The first objective is now well in hand. At the moment the EU currently represents the UK as well as all the other EU Member States in the WTO. By the time we leave the European Union on 29 March 2019, we will need to have put in place arrangements that allow the UK to represent itself the organization. Fortunately we are already a full member of the WTO, as is every other EU Member State. But our position in the WTO is currently defined by documents called schedules that we share with all the other EU Member States. By the time we leave the EU we will need to have transferred those WTO commitments into UK-only schedules. We have pledged to do so through a transparent and consultative process that seeks to avoid disrupting trade, essentially by replicating our existing trade regime. We recognize that the EU27, amongst our trade partners, also have much at stake in this process. That is why we have been discussing with the Commission how we can progress our transition in a way that does not disadvantage the EU27.

Establishing our position in the WTO by the time we leave the EU is an essential part of laying the groundwork for the role the UK intends to play thereafter. The UK was one of the most influential states in founding the global trading system after the Second World War. The pragmatic and flexible multilateral system that we helped put in place has progressively brought down tariff duties, one of the main costs and barriers to international trade, from an average of over 40% for industrial goods in 1947 to around 2% in major developed markets like the US today. This has unleashed trillions of dollars in global trade, and helped lift billions of people out of poverty. In the last twenty years, trade has increased four times, while average tariffs have fallen by 15%.

Since the founding of the post-war trading system the UK has gone from one of the world’s largest exporters of industrial goods to the world’s second largest exporter of services. The future of global trade will be as much about data as it is about duties, and for an increasing number of countries, more about selling banking, accounting, tourism, transport, education, legal services, and all the services that sophisticated modern manufactured products require. The potential for global growth and development from this digitally-enabled, service-driven, economic revolution is enormous, but so are the challenges. Championing this transformation and delivering its benefits for people in Britain and around the world will be part of the UK’s new global mission.

The second priority of our post EU Referendum priorities in Geneva is simpler in one sense. It involves carrying on doing exactly what we did before the EU Referendum. The UK has always been at the heart of the multilateral system, from the instrumental role we played in founding the United Nations back in the 1940s to being the first G20 country to reach the UN target of committing 0.7% of our Gross National Income to overseas aid in 2013. Today, that commitment makes the UK one of the largest donors to the global multilateral system.

But in another sense, demonstrating our commitment to the multilateral system is even more important than establishing our position in the WTO. Many of our friends and partners around the world, many of the countries that have looked to the UK to uphold a rules-based international system, are understandably asking whether the UK’s decision to leave the EU heralds a wider disengagement. Perhaps they worry that they will not longer be able to count on the UK to help address the manifold challenges and crises the world faces. Or that the UK will become less open, less of a leader in the extraordinary explosion in the exchange of ideas, people, goods, services and now digital connections that has brought the world together as never before in human history.

Only time will, I hope, fully reassure our friends and partners that we will use our departure from the EU to strengthen democratic consent at home for advancing the open international system of which Geneva is such an important part. In the meantime, the UK Mission in Geneva will seek to provide the reassurance we can that our commitment to making the multilateral system work even better for all our countries, and in particular for people most in need, remains undimmed.