The Anti-Coercion Instrument has been adopted

On October 23rd, 2023, the Council adopted the Anti-Coercion Instrument. The adoption by the Council comes a couple of weeks after the European Parliament formally gave its consent to the instrument on October 3rd. The Council’s press release states that the regulation will be signed on November 22nd. Assuming the regulation will be published in the Official Journal on that same day, it will enter into force on December 12th, 2023. In this blog post, I look at the Anti-Coercion Instrument from the perspective of democratic accountability. I will make the case that a unilateral trade instrument as political as the Anti-Coercion Instrument needs strong democratic control mechanisms. Such mechanisms are lacking.