Once an agreement has been reached, the Commission recommends that the Council sign and indicates whether it believes the agreement is mixed or not. The agreement then goes through a process called “legal recursition” and translation to result in a final version of the text. On 22 October 2019, the House of Commons agreed, by 329 votes to 299, to give a second reading to the revised withdrawal agreement (negotiated by Boris Johnson earlier this month), but when the accelerated timetable it had proposed did not receive the necessary parliamentary support, Johnson announced that the law would be overturned. [38] [12] Once the agreement is approved by EU governments, it is sent to the European Parliament for approval. Parliament plays a conceptually secondary role in ratifying these agreements, as it can only approve or reject them without making changes. Nevertheless, Parliament still has a veto. International agreements will be referred to the relevant committee – in the case of the UK, it will be the Foreign Affairs Committees (AFET) and International Trade Committees (INTA). The committee then reviews each convention and draws up a report that will be submitted to parliament as a whole, retaining the views of other interested committees and recommending that they be adopted or rejected. Following the ratification processes in the EU and the UK, the UK left the EU on Friday 31 January 2020. Although the withdrawal agreement is no longer a member of the EU, it provides for a transitional period until 31 December 2020. During this transitional period, the UK will remain within the EU internal market and customs union, and EU rules and regulations will continue to apply. After approval by the European Parliament, the Council must take a decision to confirm the agreement.

Once this is published in the Official Journal, the ratification process will be completed, at least for non-mixed agreements. On the European Union side, the European Parliament also approved the ratification of the agreement on 29 January 2020[40] and the Council of the European Union approved the conclusion of the agreement by e-mail on 30 January 2020. [42] That is why, on 30 January 2020, the European Union also tabled its instrument for ratification of the agreement, concluding the agreement[43] and allowing it to enter into force on the date of the UK`s withdrawal from the EU on 31 January 2020, at 11 .m GMT. The British Parliament approved the draft agreement by adopting on 23 January 2020 the implementing laws (the 2020 Withdrawal Agreement Act) of the European Union (withdrawal agreement). Following the signing of the agreement, the UK Government adopted and tabled the UK`s ratification instrument on 29 January 2020. [7] The agreement was ratified by the Council of the European Union on 30 January 2020, after approval by the European Parliament on 29 January 2020.