The U.K. Conservative Party’s base won’t rest until all traces of the European Court of Justice are erased from British life. High profile Brexiteer and former minister Iain Duncan Smith referred to it ahead of the Brexit referendum vote last year, for example, as an “illegitimate challenge to our sovereignty.” [...]
The first is that anyone living or doing business in the EU, including any government body, is subject to ECJ jurisdiction. To be free of it would be to reject the rule of law. So unless the U.K. proposes to stop doing business with Europe altogether it cannot escape the ECJ.
More significantly, the Brexiteers reserve a special hatred for the ECJ while forgetting those other supranational judicial bodies the U.K. is signed up to. Britain is a member of many international law bodies, most prominently as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (Britain is hardly about to give up its Security Council seat on sovereignty grounds).
The U.K. is also a member of the World Trade Organization, a body whose rules it will rely upon in case it fails to strike a Brexit deal with the EU. The irony there is that if the U.K.’s hard-line stance on the ECJ derails Brexit talks, it will force the U.K. into the arms of another international body with the power to dictate its affairs.
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