On 23 October 2020, in Tokyo, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for International Trade, Liz Truss, and Japan’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Motegi Toshimitsu, signed the Agreement between Japan and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership. It is the first bilateral trade agreement London signed after leaving the European Union. Article 24.7 makes the English and Japanese texts equally authentic, except for certain tariff and services annexes drawn up in English only.

Article 1.1 sets the object: to liberalise and facilitate trade and investment and to promote a closer economic relationship. The architecture follows the 2019 European Union–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, which still applied to the United Kingdom until the end of the transition period. The main departures from that text sit in digital trade, financial services, rules of origin and a new chapter on women and the economy.

On goods, the tariff schedules pick up the European calendar from the third year of cuts. By 2039, 99.66 per cent of tariff lines for British exports to Japan are to be duty-free. Of the 25 agricultural tariff-rate quotas in the European agreement, London kept secondary access to 10 (soft cheese, wheat, butter), after the Union’s share, and lost the other 15. Selected car parts, rail cars and control panels were zero-rated at once, for Japanese plants in the United Kingdom.

Chapter 8 covers services, investment liberalisation and electronic commerce. Article 8.84 bars a Party from prohibiting or restricting cross-border transfers of information, including personal information, for the business of a covered person, subject to public-policy exceptions. Article 8.85 bars a requirement to use or locate computing facilities in the other Party’s territory as a condition of doing business there. Article 8.73 bars, as a condition of import, distribution, sale or use, the transfer of or access to source code or an algorithm expressed in that source code.

The same chapter does not create bilateral-investment-treaty-style investor protection and does not provide investor–state dispute settlement. Disputes remain state-to-state under Chapter 22. The most-favoured-nation clause in Article 8.9.4 cannot be used to import an investor–state mechanism from another agreement. There is a review clause if either Party later concludes an agreement with such safeguards.

Chapter 21, “Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment”, creates a working group and cooperation activities; Article 21.4 takes it out of dispute settlement. Article 24.3 brings the agreement into force on a date agreed after domestic procedures are complete, no sooner than the date the European Union–Japan agreement ceases to apply to the United Kingdom, identified in an exchange of diplomatic notes. The notes of 18 December 2020 fixed 1 January 2021. Article 24.4 allows termination on six months’ notice.

The instrument is a bilateral agreement, not British accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. The later accession request to that pact, and later British trade treaties, are separate instruments.

Image: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Kasumigaseki, place of signature; Kakidai, 2018; CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. Cropped to 16:9.

Source consulted: Japan–United Kingdom Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement. Treaty text: Agreement for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership, Tokyo, 23 October 2020 (CS Japan No.1/2020).