Revue LISA ()
Le Brexit et la souveraineté parlementaire britannique au miroir de l’accord de continuité Maroc-Royaume-Uni : enjeux politiques, commerciaux et éthiques
Abstract
Brexit has revived debate over parliamentary sovereignty and the UK Parliament’s ability to scrutinise government action. On foreign policy matters, the signature of treaties fall under the Royal Prerogative by virtue of which the Queen’s signature is sufficient to bind the UK to a treaty (C. Lageot 2019). The constitutional process of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and bilateral agreements concluded by the UK with third countries also testify to the complex procedures introduced by the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 (CRAG). Within this dynamic, the continuity agreement signed with the kingdom of Morocco in 2019 has been central to recent debates on British parliamentary sovereignty in the UK parliament.Building on James Strong’s interpretations of the role of the House of Commons, this article extends its analysis to the House of Lords so as to examine interactions between the pro-Polisario parliamentary mobilisation and the issue of parliamentary sovereignty in the context of Brexit. At the same time, it explains how pro-Polisario MPs adjusted their activism to the procedural requirements of Brexit, and to the tools at their disposal in order to follow the UK-Morocco association agreement’s trajectory within Parliament. Based on Jamie Gaskarth’s national role conceptions, this article then goes on to examine how such mobilization took place in light of the horizontal contestation of Britain’s various role conceptions, in an attempt to identify the dynamics, tensions and potential role conflicts underlying the bilateral transposition of UK-Morocco economic relations from January 2021.
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