The EU headquarters in Brussels | John Thys/AFP via Getty Images Mentions of UK to stay in EU treaty after Brexit, says MEP Committee chair says references to Britain will be ‘a dead branch’ after EU exit.

References to the U.K. are unlikely to be erased from the Treaty of Lisbon after Brexit and will instead be considered "obsolete," according to a senior member of the European Parliament.

Danuta Hübner, a Polish MEP who chairs the constitutional affairs committee, told POLITICO that the U.K.'s exit from the EU should not result in treaty change, nor should it mean legal experts would be obliged to cover the words "United Kingdom" with correction fluid.

“We don’t need changes in the treaty,” said Hübner, whose committee will be responsible for drafting the Parliament's response to the Brexit deal struck between the U.K. and the EU.

Hübner said any reference to the U.K in the treaty would be declared "obsolete,” meaning “no longer applicable" because of the "disappearance of the situation to which it could be applied.”

“The references to the U.K. would stay in the treaty,” Hubner added, “but they would become a dead branch.”

Whether reference to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland should remain or not was discussed in a report by the committee on Brexit in January.

The withdrawal of the U.K. could result in “at least material changes," the report said, including to Article 52, which lists the U.K. as one of the countries in which the treaty applies.

The European Commission refused to comment on Hübner's claim. But privately some officials acknowledge that modification to the treaty could be carried out at a later date.