Treaties, Brexit and the Constitution

Jill Barrett will speak on ‘Parliament’s role in negotiating, concluding and implementing treaty obligations and the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010’ at a one-day conference on Treaties, Brexit and the Constitution at Jesus College, Oxford on 23 March 2018.

The conference will bring together invited representatives from Parliament, government and the judiciary, practicing lawyers and researchers and is sponsored by the House of Commons, Jesus College and Oxford University’s Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government. Its goal is to provide timely and well-founded recommendations for parliamentarians as they decide how best to shape the constitutional settlement after Brexit. It will focus on:

– Parliamentary sovereignty and the implications of Miller;
– Parliament’s role in negotiating, concluding, and implementing treaty obligations;
– constitutional treaties, the devolution settlement and the British–Irish Agreement 1998; and
– what we can learn through international comparison.

Jill Barrett was formerly Legal Counsellor at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. While at the FCO, she led the Government’s work on the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, Part 2 (Ratification of Treaties). She published an article on this subject: ‘The United Kingdom and Parliamentary Scrutiny of Treaties: Recent Reforms’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 60 (1), 225-245.