The UK has finally made an offer to allow some EU citizens to retain some rights in the UK after Brexit. There are two sets of issues that arise: the substantive rights that will need to be agreed to, and the enforcement of these rights. In a statement yesterday to the House of Commons, the Prime Minister confirmed the publication of a Home Office policy paper which provided more details and confirmed in a short paragraph that the arrangements on offer will be enshrined and enforceable in UK

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... , that commitments in the Withdrawal Agreement will have the status of international law, but that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) will have no jurisdiction in the United Kingdom. Despite this offer, there remains much uncertainty. Dispute over enforcement Difficult though these issues will be to resolve, the enforcement issue is even trickier. The EU-27 rightly insists that any guarantees with the UK over the rights of EU citizens should be 'effective [and] enforceable', and the European Commission's chief negotiator, Michel Barnier wants 'crystal-clear guarantees that rights will be effectively enforced.' But this leaves quite a lot of space as to the nature of the guarantees that would be sufficient. The inevitable disputes over the application of such an agreement must, from the EU-27's perspective, be resolved by a process that the EU-27 trusts to implement the agreement well into the future. To ensure this, it is clear that they want the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to have jurisdiction over the interpretation and enforcement of these guarantees. Theresa May has argued that this is unnecessary since the British courts are already well-respected and can be trusted to uphold any agreement. Expect lots of huffing and puffing by the Prime Minister and her fellowtravellers, and plenty of bait and switch: to refuse to leave the enforcement of the law to the UK courts alone will be portrayed as in some way insulting to British judges; to insist on a role for the CJEU will be said to impinge on national sovereignty. The difficulty with Parliamentary sovereignty In my view, the EU is entirely justified to insist on a continuing role for the CJEU. Theresa May's problem in convincing the EU-27 on this point derives from the nature of the British Constitution which British judges swear to uphold, not with the judges who loyally follow the logic of that constitution. The UK government is about to discover that the rhetoric of 'taking back control' and the reassertion of Parliamentary sovereignty of the most traditional kind is a major problem when it enters the brave new world of international negotiations. Although the issue has first arisen in the context of the future rights of EU citizens living in the UK, it is by no means confined to this issue; rather, it goes to the credibility of British offers of guarantees in all other areas under negotiation as well, not least those concerning Northern Ireland, one of the other 'divorce' issues on which sufficient progress must be made before trade talks can begin.