To ask the Minister of Justice for her assessment of how the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union will affect civil, family and criminal justice co-operation in Northern Ireland.

Mrs Long

Civil and family justice cooperation does not feature in the trade and cooperation agreement, and those areas are now largely governed by existing international agreements. In the family justice field, that leaves relatively few gaps, because Hague conventions, such as the 1996 Hague convention relating to cross-border contact, residence and child protection cases and the 2007 Hague convention that applies to cross-border maintenance cases, cover much of the same ground as the EU instruments. In relation to civil and commercial law, there are limited international cooperation mechanisms. The only substantial one is the Lugano convention of 2007, which the UK has applied to rejoin, and a decision on that is awaited. In the meantime, other than in cases where there is an exclusive choice of court contract covered by the 2005 Hague choice of court convention — that is a commercial contract where both sides agree at the outset the jurisdiction in which a dispute will be heard — cross-border disputes will be left to the domestic rules of the relevant countries to resolve. That will, unfortunately, lead to a lack of clarity over which court has jurisdiction in a case and to potentially more expensive and lengthier parallel proceedings. The trade and cooperation agreement includes provisions on law enforcement and judicial cooperation in criminal matters.

Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Beggs)

I am afraid that our time is up and that you will not be able to get a supplementary on this occasion. That is the end of listed questions to the Minister; we now move on to topical questions.