Sterling slipped to a session low against the dollar after Britain's Attorney General Geoffrey Cox published his opinion on Prime Minister Theresa May's recently amended Brexit deal.
Cox said Tuesday that legal risks to Brexit still continue to exist despite late-night concessions from the European Union on Monday. He added that the revised document did not give Britain any legal means of exiting the "Irish backstop" arrangements unilaterally.
"The legal risk remains unchanged that if through no such demonstrable failure of either party, but simply because of intractable differences, that situation does arise, the United Kingdom would have ... no internationally lawful means of exiting the Protocol's arrangements, save by agreement," Cox said in a statement.
The British currency slipped 0.7 percent to trade at $1.3054 by 11:30 a.m. London time Tuesday. It also slipped nearly 1 percent against the euro.
In a last-ditch attempt to persuade skeptical Brexiteers to accept her deal, May traveled to Strasbourg Monday night and won legally binding assurances from the EU over the most contentious part of the deal, the Irish backstop. The backstop is a mechanism to avoid restoration of the "hard" border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland that was erased with the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement between London and Dublin.
Attorney General Cox's legal advice on the tweaked deal is seen as crucial to whether the assurances May received on Monday are enough to give wavering MPs the confidence to give her deal the green light.
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