The Separation of EU Trade and Investment Agreements Is Continuing

The legal texts of the EU - Singapore Free Trade Agreement and the EU - Singapore Investment Protection Agreement are now available here. A European Commission press release related to these agreements, and also covering the EU - Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, explains the next steps as follows:

The Commission today presented the outcome of negotiations for the Economic Partnership Agreement with Japan and the trade and investment agreements with Singapore to the Council. This is the first step towards the signature and conclusion of these agreements.

A swift conclusion and a quick implementation of the most important trade agreement ever negotiated by the EU was a personal commitment undertaken by the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker and the Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe. During a bilateral Summit and at the margins of a G7 Summit, both leaders provided political leadership at the highest level in order to accelerate and finalise negotiations in 2017. The agreement should be signed in the upcoming EU- Japan Summit, to be held in Brussels by the summer.

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The trade and investment agreements with Singapore are the EU's first completed bilateral deals with a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). ...

Once approved by the Council, the agreements will be sent to the European Parliament, aiming for the entry into force of the trade agreements with Japan and Singapore before the end of the current mandate of the European Commission in 2019; the investment protection agreement with Singapore will follow its ratification procedure also at Member State level.

At the same time, negotiations with Japan continue on investment protection standards and investment protection dispute resolution. The firm commitment on both sides is to move towards an agreement in the investment protection negotiations as soon as possible, in light of the shared commitment to a stable and secure investment environment in Europe and Japan.

I assume the EU - Singapore trade/investment agreements and the EU - Japan trade agreement will be approved by the relevant EU institutions, but I guess you never know with these things.

With regard to the EU - Singapore investment protection agreement, EU member state ratification is also required. The EU explains here that: "The agreement contains all aspects of the EU's new approach to investment protection and its enforcement mechanisms that are not present in the existing bilateral investment treaties between Singapore and EU Member States. The agreement replaces the 12 existing bilateral investment treaties and establishes a modern common investment protection framework for all EU investors in Singapore." Will the EU member states vote to replace the existing BITs with the new investment court system?

The EU - Japan investment protection agreement still needs to be negotiated. Will the two sides make any progress on reconciling their different views, or will they eventually abandon the effort?