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@Martin Maloney,

First of all let me thank you for this exchange.
The two matters dealt with in the article are unrelated because if the premise is that a court of one of the two parties to an international treaty should not decide dispute between the parties, then the debate of how that court exercises the jurisdiction is completely irrelevant. Even if the court was the most unbiased and enlightened on Earth its jurisdiction would remain ipso facto questionable.
In this case we do not have to lose sight of the important fact that under the WA the UK would enter into a transitional agreement which does not treat the UK as a third country like other non-EU trading partners. The position of the UK under the WA should more properly be assimilated to that of accessing countries during the pre-accession period. They are not in the EU, but are subject to some EU laws and therefore subject to the jurisdiction of the ECJ when questions of interpretation of the EU law are the object of a dispute. Again, this is necessary to make sure that the application of the laws is uniform.
To say that the UK is treated worse than countries like Singapore and Canada means to miss the crucial point that the UK is only treated differently because the circumstances are completely different.
When talking about the degrading effect of the deal on UK's sovereignty it is also useful to remember that a transitional agreement that keeps the UK partly under the EU laws is made also, if not mainly, because the UK government believes that this is in the best interest of the UK. The government has made a balance between accepting some EU rules during the transition and the alternative of a hard exit and in has made the sovereign choice in favour of the former option.
When the WA will be lapsed and an FTA will hopefully be in place, then I have no doubt that the UK will be fully treated like any other third country and the ECJ will have no role in deciding disputes.
Two final words on the EU as an imperial entity. The EU is a very diverse organisation, its 27 members' agenda are far from being fully aligned and the amount of checks and balances in running it at every level are impressive. The suggestion that a court that is composed by judges from such diverse extraction may be able to pursue a unitary design of integration on the instruction of other EU bodies (council, commission, individual member states) from which the ECJ is autonomous and over which it exercises its jurisdiction, quite frankly, requires much better evidence before it can be accepted.

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