European Affairs Committee
24 March 2026
No chapters available yet
Legend
Transcript markers
- text Sentence being played
- text Search result
- text Intervention cited by the link you opened
Click a sentence to play the video from that moment. Select text to quote it with the speaker, timestamp and link.
More options
European Affairs Committee House of Lords
00:05 - 01:10
Speaker 1
Good morning, and welcome to the European Affairs Select Committee of the House of Lords and to our first evidence session, of our inquiry into the concept, of dynamic alignment between UK and EU law. We're particularly delighted this morning to welcome as our witnesses, professor Catherine Barnard, is professor of European law at University of Cambridge and senior fellow of UK and a changing Europe, and professor David Collins, professor of in professor of international economic law, City St. George's, University of London. And they've very kindly agreed to come this morning and give us evidence in terms of an overview of dynamic alignment, what it means, what it's all about. So in that vein, perhaps I could start with with that general question.
Since there is no formally recognized definition of it, what exactly is dynamic alignment? What are its key features that distinguish it from other types of trade arrangement? Perhaps, professor Barnard, you'd like to start?
01:10 - 02:08
Speaker 2
Yeah. Thank you. First of thank you for inviting me here to speak to you today. So at the highest level, dynamic alignment means that a country will agrees to follow the latest EU law in a particular area. However, if I may, I think you need to break it down a bit more than that.
You could say that there are two ways of looking at it. There's unilateral dynamic alignment, where a state voluntarily follows EU rules, and there is evidence that we are doing that at the moment. We might come to the new piece of the 25 act which allows us to do that. But then you've got bilateral dynamic alignment, so where dynamic alignment is prescribed in a treaty. Now within that bilateral model, I think there are probably four subways of looking at dynamic alignment.
The rest of the transcript is for Pro customers
Unlock the full transcript, chat, and every analysis feature with Polyfact Pro.
The video itself stays free to watch, in full, no account needed.
Ask anything about this video — I analyse its transcript to answer.