egotiations on the Indonesia-European Union Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IEU-CEPA) finally concluded in September after 10 years of wrangling, but the two sides have a lot to do before the free trade agreement (FTA) comes into effect.
EU Ambassador to Indonesia and Brunei Darussalam Denis Chaibi sat down with The Jakarta Post’s M. Taufiqurrahman, Mark Lempp and Deni Ghifari on Friday to discuss what’s next in the process and how it will change the trade landscape.
Below are excerpts from the interview.
Question: What’s next after the completion of the negotiations?
Answer: For the next six months, legal scrubbing. So legal scrubbing is these special lawyers in Indonesia and the EU comparing notes on the agreement and making sure that it’s coherent, tight, coherent with other FTAs, coherent with World Trade Organization rules. They go through the text and kind of clean it.
What’s very important is that cleaning the text is not a renegotiation of what has been agreed, and we have to make sure that there’s no renegotiation but that there’s also a lot of engagement. […]
Every Monday
If everyone plays ball, works very hard, focused, [in] six months it can be done. It’s tough, but it can be done. Then we move to the signing ceremony. We try to do something nice, political, and then start the ratification procedure.