BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Dozens of British officials and their EU counterparts got a initial full turn of Brexit negotiations underneath approach on Monday, bringing a still hum to a European Commission’s Brussels headquarters.
After a brief handshake and sit-down for a cameras between Brexit Secretary David Davis and arch EU adjudicator Michel Barnier, a span left a genuine work of a week to teams of polite servants divided into groups by topic.
Davis returned to London yet will be behind on Thursday, officials said, in a wish that he and Barnier can give their domestic publicity to a initial set of prejudiced agreements.
Barnier’s group is famous as a Article 50 Task Force after a sustenance of a EU covenant underneath that Britain has opted to quit a European Union. Numbering about 40, many are concerned in a talks in a EU executive’s Berlaymont headquarters.
Officials described a discord as negotiators and staff changed among assembly bedrooms sparse along carpeted corridors and adult and down rises over scarcely half of a cross-shaped building’s 13 floors.
Barnier, a former French cupboard apportion who many prefers to pronounce his local tongue, greeted Davis in English, a usually denunciation many British polite servants can work in. Though Barnier insisted French be one of a dual languages for negotiations, English is a lingua franca of Brussels and will predominate.
No Notes
The assembly between Davis and Barnier featured usually dual aides each; a deficiency of records in front of a British trio, compared to sheaves of papers on a EU side, sparked sardonic jibes from critics in Britain who see Prime Minister Theresa’s May’s supervision as divided and badly unprepared.
Other meetings concerned adult to 10 officials on any side, removing “down to work” as Davis said, and good wakeful that a dire Mar 2019 deadline competence tighten their summer holidays.
“They have coffee,” one source said. “And cookies, too.”
The initial design is to uncover adequate swell on a divorce package so that a EU will determine to open talks on a destiny giveaway trade deal.
The 3 priorities are ordinarily referred to as citizens’ rights, financial allotment and borders with Ireland. There are also a horde of other lax ends that both sides wish to see tied adult legally to equivocate a pell-mell dilapidation on Brexit Day in Mar 2019.
London and Brussels determine that some 4.5 million expatriates who live on possibly side of a new EU-UK border, two-thirds of them in Britain, should not remove rights they have as EU citizens.
Britain has baulked, however, during EU final that extend to their relatives, and during carrying those rights guaranteed by EU judges.
Paying a Bill
The EU also wants London to accept a check to cover a share of EU spending commitments finished while Britain was a member. The Commission has oral of 60 billion euros ($70 billion), yet Barnier says that for now he usually wants an agreement on how to calculate it. May has pronounced usually that Britain will compensate if it owes something yet left open a probability that it competence be a EU that pays London.
Rights and financial are being dealt with dual operative groups. A third is traffic with assorted issues such as what happens to superb EU justice cases involving Britain.
Barnier and Davis’s deputies, Sabine Weyand and Oliver Robbins, are privately directing efforts to extent intrusion to assent in Northern Ireland from a origination of a new EU border.
The EU timetable, that Britain has broadly consented to after unwell in a bid to start trade talks immediately in parallel, sees discussions on a low giveaway trade agreement starting by early subsequent year and being resolved in extended outline by around Oct 2018 — when a withdrawal covenant could be finished and dusted.
That would give time to sanction a divorce package before Britain is out on Mar 30, 2019, and arrange a transition to equivocate trade descending off a “cliff edge” before a full covenant to keep markets jointly open can be resolved by, say, 2021.
For now, though, a aspiration is usually to get by 4 days of closed-door talks with adequate swell to uncover a open on Thursday.
Editing by Kevin Liffey