This letter accompanies an Explanatory Memorandum (16262/07) concerning a Council Decision establishing the Community position within the General Council of the World Trade Organisation on the accession of the Republic of Cape Verde to the World Trade Organisation. The reason for writing to you is to explain why it has been necessary to lift the UK's parliamentary scrutiny reserve in the Council.

  On 7 December Member States were told by the European Commission at the Article 133 Committee that the WTO Accession Working Party report had been adopted in Geneva and that this would enable the WTO General Council to vote on Cape Verde's accession on 18 December. This means that the EU must conclude its arrangements for agreeing to the accession of Cape Verde to the WTO before the General Council. As this issue had not been scrutinised by your committee, the UK entered a parliamentary scrutiny reserve on 7 December.

  On 6 December the Commission circulated its written proposal for a Council Decision to establish the Community position on Cape Verde's WTO accession. However, the Council Legal Services and Member States considered the legal basis of the Commission's proposal to be inadequate. The issue was that the Commission considered that it had sole competence to conclude WTO negotiations whereas Council Legal Services and Member States considered that aspects of Cape Verde's WTO accession protocol, including reciprocal market access conditions, were matters where Member States shared competence and were not entirely of Community competence, requiring additional legal bases to be cited. The Council Secretariat therefore replaced the text of the Commission proposal with another text extending the legal base. Member States were requested to clear the amended Council Decision by written procedure by 14 December, and all Member States have now confirmed their agreement.

  The revised Council Secretariat text was not circulated until 12 December. This presented my Department with an extremely tight timetable and it was not therefore possible to follow normal parliamentary scrutiny procedures and an Explanatory Memorandum could not be submitted to enable your Committee to consider it before parliamentary recess. If the UK had maintained its scrutiny reservation, the EU would not have been able to express a position at the General Council, and consequently Cape Verde's accession to the WTO would have been delayed. In my view this was not in the UK's or the EU's interests. I hope, therefore, you can accept my explanation and apologies for having to agree to override UK parliamentary scrutiny procedures on this occasion.

  We have kept the Clerks of the Committees informed. On Friday 7 December my department advised both David Griffiths and Andrew Makower of receipt by BERR the day before of a Commission proposal for a Council Decision and explained the timing difficulties we faced. David Griffiths and Andrew Makower were further updated on 12 December just before we received the Council Secretariat amendments.

17 December 2007