The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a proposed free trade agreement between the European Union and the United States. Proponents say the agreement would result in multilateral economic growth, while critics say it would increase corporate power and make it more difficult for governments to regulate markets for public benefit. The American government considers the TTIP a companion agreement to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. After a proposed draft was leaked in March 2014, the European Commission launched a public consultation on a limited set of clauses and in January 2015 published parts of an overview.
Documents released by the European Commission in July 2014 group the topics under discussion into three broad areas: Market access; Specific regulation; and broader rules and principles and modes of co-operation.
The EU negotiating mandate as of June 2013 gave a fuller view of what the Council of the European Union (Foreign Affairs) has told its negotiators to try to achieve for each section. No corresponding U.S. text is available, but the American side has released a public statement setting out its objectives and the potential benefits it foresees.
TTIP includes chapters on market access for goods and services, which aimed at removing "custom duties on goods and restrictions on services, gaining better access to public markets, and making it easier to invest". The goods part includes rules on market access for goods, agriculture and processed agricultural products, and rules of origin.
For "Trade in Services, Investment and E-commerce", a draft text dated 7 July 2013 was leaked by the German newspaper, Die Zeit in March 2014. The leaked text contains seven chapters. In chapter I, article 1 states the overall objective of "a better climate for the development of trade and investment", particularly the "liberalisation of investment and cooperation on e-commerce".
Negotiations are held in week-long cycles alternating between Brussels and Washington. The negotiators hope to conclude their work by the end of 2015. The ninth round of negotiations will take place on 20-24 April 2015 in New York.
The 28 governments will then have to approve or reject the negotiated agreement in the EU Council of Ministers, at which point the European Parliament will also be asked for its endorsement. The EU Parliament is empowered to approve or reject the agreement. Different countries have different rules on approving and ratifying the document. For example, Article 53 of the French Constitution states, "trade treaties can only be ratified by a law". In the United States, both houses of the U.S. Congress would have to ratify it.
The TTIP Agreement texts are being developed by 24 joint EU-US working groups, each considering a separate aspect of the agreement. Development typically progresses through a number of phases. Broad position papers are first exchanged, introducing each side's aims and ambitions for each aspect. These are followed by textual proposals from each side, accompanied (in areas such as tariffs, and market access) by each side's "initial offer." These negotiations and draft documents can evolve (change) through the various stages of their development. When both sides are ready, a consolidated text is prepared, with remaining differences for discussion expressed in square brackets. These texts are then provisionally closed topic by topic as a working consensus is reached. However the agreement is negotiated as a whole, so no topic's text is finalised until full consensus is reached.
In November 2014 Bulgarian government announced that it will not ratify the agreement unless the United States lifted visa requirements for Bulgarian citizens.
Chapter II, articles 3 to 18 contains general principles for investment. Article 14 contains proposed rules which forbid governments to "directly or indirectly nationalise, expropriate" unless it is for a public purpose, under due process of law, on a non-discriminatory basis, with compensation. Article 14(2) defines the necessary compensation as being "fair market value of the investment at the time immediately before the expropriation or the impending expropriation became public knowledge plus interest at a commercial rate established on a market basis".
Chapter III, articles 19 to 23 contains rules on cross border supply of services.
Chapter IV, Articles 24 to 28 would allow free movement of business managers, and other employees of a corporation, for temporary work purposes among all countries party to the agreement. Article 1(2) makes it clear, however, that no more general free movement of workers and citizens is allowed.
Chapter V contains eight sections with particular rules for different economic sectors. Section I, articles 29 to 31, set out principles which states must follow in licensing private corporations, and state that requirements that are not proportionate to a reviewable public policy objective are contrary to the treaty. Section II contains general provisions. Section III covers computer services. Section IV, articles 35 to 39, cover liberalisation of postal services. Section V, articles 40 to 50, apply to electronic communications networks and services (including telecommunications) and mandate competitive markets, absence of cross-subsidies, subject to defined exceptions including in article 46 a right (but not a requirement) for countries to provide universal service.
Section VI of chapter V covers Financial Services, in articles 51 to 59. It limits the laws that governments can pass to regulate or publicly run insurance and banking. Any regulations that do not fall within the Treaty's terms and objectives would be unlawful. Legitimate reasons for regulation include, in article 52, "the protection of investors, depositors, policy-holders or persons to whom a fiduciary duty is owed by a financial service supplier; (b) ensuring the integrity and stability of a Party's financial system". However article 52(2) states "measures shall not be more burdensome than necessary to achieve their aim", and the Treaty does not include any further reasons to allow regulation. Section VII covers international maritime transport and section VIII covers air transport.
The Annex on "Investors-state dispute settlement" proposed to allow corporations to bring actions against governments for breach of its rights. The European Commission launched a public consultation after the draft text was leaked, which led to a number of changes. However, an updated proposed text had yet to be made publicly available.
The proposed agreement has attracted criticism from a wide variety of NGOs and activists, particularly in Europe.
In March 2013, a coalition of digital rights organisations and other groups issued a declaration in which they called on the negotiating partners to have TAFTA "debated in the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament, national parliaments, and other transparent forums" instead of conducting "closed negotiations that give privileged access to corporate insiders", and to leave intellectual property out of the agreement.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and its German counterpart, FFII, in particular, compared TAFTA to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), signed by the United States, the European Union and 22 of its 27
member states. An online consultation conducted by the European Commission received 150,000 responses. According to the commission, 97% of the responses were pre-defined, negative answers provided by activists.
Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) is an instrument that allows an investor to bring a case directly against the country hosting its investment, without the intervention of the government of the investor’s country of origin. From the late 1980s, certain Trade Treaties have included provisions for Investor-state dispute settlement, which allowed Foreign Investors who had been disadvantaged by actions of a Signatory State to sue for damages in a Tribunal of Arbitration. More recently such claims have increased in number and value, and some states have become increasingly resistant to such clauses.
In December 2013, a coalition of over 200 environmentalists, labor unions and consumer advocacy organizations on both sides of the Atlantic sent a letter to the USTR and European Commission demanding the investor-state dispute settlement be dropped from the trade talks, claiming that ISDS was "a one-way street by which corporations can challenge government policies, but neither governments nor individuals are granted any comparable rights to hold corporations accountable". Some point out the "potential for abuse" that may be inherent in the trade agreement due to its clauses relating to investor protection.
In December 2013, Martti Koskenniemi, Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki, warned that the planned foreign investor protection scheme within the treaty, similar to World Bank Group's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), would endanger the sovereignty of the signatory states by allowing for a small circle of legal experts sitting in a foreign court of arbitration an unprecedented power to interpret and void the signatory states' legislation.
From both the European and American sides of the agreement, there are issues which are seen as essential if an accord is to be reached. According to Leif Johan Eliasson of Saarland University, "For the EU these include greater access to the American public procurement market, retained bans on imports of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) crops and hormone treated beef, and recognition of geographic trademarks on food products. For the United States they include greater access for American dairy and other agricultural products (including scientific studies as the only accepted criteria for SPS policies)". He observes that measures like the EU ban on hormone treated beef (based as they are on the Precautionary Principle) are not considered by the WTO to be based on scientific studies. He further cites as US objectives, "tariff-free motor vehicle exports, and retained bans on foreign contractors in several areas, such as domestic shipping". Already, some U.S. producers are concerned by EU proposals to restrict their use of "particular designations" (also known as PDO or GI/geographical indications) that the EU considers location-specific, such as Feta and Parmesan cheeses and possibly Budweiser beer. This has provoked debate between European politicians such as Renate Künast and Christian Schmidt over the value of the designations.
At French insistence, trade in audio-visual services was excluded from the EU negotiating mandate. The European side has been pressing for the agreement to include a chapter on the regulation of financial services; but this is being resisted by the American side, which has recently passed the Dodd-Frank Act in this field. U.S. Ambassador Anthony Gardner has denied any linkage between the two issues.
European negotiators are also pressing the United States to loosen its restrictions on the export of crude oil and natural gas, to help the EU reduce its dependence on energy from Russia. The United States has so far reserved its position.
Karel De Gucht responded to criticism in a Guardian article in December 2013, saying "The commission has regularly consulted a broad range of civil society organisations in writing and in person, and our most recent meeting had 350 participants from trade unions, NGOs and business". However, the Corporate Europe Observatory (cited in the original Guardian article) had pointed out, based on a Freedom of Information request, that "more than 93% of the Commission's meetings with stakeholders during the preparations of the negotiations were with big business". They characterized the industry meetings as "about the EU's preparations of the trade talks", and the civil society consultation as "an information session after the talks were launched".
I think this agreement should not be passed because of these ridiculous abilities to sue the government for having a national health service or a minimum wage, or even not recognising seed patents, what do you think?
