Legal trade and (il)legitimate routes

• Department of Law

The Working Group on Palestine is delighted to invite you to a discussion on EU trade relations and Palestine.

EU trade with occupied territories has long been contested. In the context of Palestine and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), academic opinion largely suggests that the EU and its Member States are under an obligation to refrain from economic and trade relations with Israel insofar as these concern the OPT. Yet the EU remains one of the OPT’s largest trading partners and has primarily regulated such trade through two instruments. First, the 2005 Technical Arrangement between the EU and Israel excludes settlement goods from preferential treatment under the EU–Israel Association Agreement. Its implementation relies on specific customs codes and a list of postcodes for areas occupied by Israel, maintained and regularly updated by the European Commission. Second, the Commission’s 2015 Interpretative Notice on the indication of origin of goods from territories occupied by Israel provides guidance on labelling requirements. However, neither measure was designed to compel the EU to abstain from economic or trade relations with Israeli settlements.

This discussion examines how the EU, particularly through its technical rules governing customs and labeling, addresses trade with the OPT and how this approach is implemented in practice. Given the limitations and gaps in the existing legal frameworks, it also begins to explore how EU Member States, alongside other actors such as civil society organizations and NGOs, can engage with these issues moving forward.