EU-US trade pact to miss 2015 deadline - "Europe should not sell its soul to the devil" - by Benjamin Fox

A 2015 deadline to agree a landmark trade deal with the United States is likely to be missed, EU trade officials have conceded.

"We cannot exclude that it may take longer," Latvian foreign minister Edgars Rinkevics, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, told reporters following a meeting of EU trade ministers on Wednesday (25 March).

“We have to do our best to get an agreement but we don’t want to reach an agreement just for the sake of it,” he added. “The political will is there but there is an acceptance that it may take longer”.

“We are aiming to conclude this under the Obama administration … but I cannot give you a date,” said EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom, who added that ratification of TTIP could get caught up in the next US presidential election cycle.

The race to replace Barack Obama will begin in earnest in autumn, when the Democratic and Republican parties begin their nomination process ahead of the presidential election in November 2016.

Trade negotiators have now concluded eight rounds of talks with a view to agreeing a transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP), but were given a provisional deadline of December 2015 by EU leaders to agree a draft text.

The most thorny issue for ministers remains the investor protection mechanism known as ISDS, which allows firms to take governments to court if they discriminate against them or introduce new laws which threaten their investments.

“ISDS is a hot potato,” conceded Rinkevics. He said there are “differences in opinion” amongst ministers, but added there is no indication that member states want to open up the EU-Canada trade agreement, which includes the controversial regime.

Note EU-Digest: A European Parliamentarian when asked about the TTIP and the ISDS controversy said. "The EU must not sell  its soul to the devil by agreeing to the non-transparent TTIP - regardless of the 'fantastic' stories we hear about the economic benefits of the TTIP, we only need to look at the results achieved following the NAFTA agreement between Canada, Mexico,  and the US."

 "That  agreement, which has now been in effect 20 years, still shows little improvement in the overall economic conditions of ordinary citizens in the participating countries." 

"NAFTA has, however, certainly been a bonanza for the free-wheeling, uncontrolled, multi-national corporations - we must not repeat that in these negotiations with the US."

Read more: EU-US trade pact to miss 2015 deadline

EU-US Trade Negotiations: EU sovereignty ‘at risk’ if judicial independence is surrendered to multinational corporations

More than 200 organisations across the EU, including the TUC, Greenpeace and War on Want, have written a joint letter to European and American trade negotiators demanding the removal of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process from the final treaty.

“ISDS is a one-way street by which corporations can challenge government policies, but neither governments nor individuals are granted comparable rights to hold corporations accountable,” they wrote.

Campaign groups in Britain are due to put their concerns to the Department of Business  this Wednesday, while an Early Day Motion in Parliament, signed by MPs from all parties, calls for the trade talks to be frozen until the issue is resolved.

The European Commission and the British Government insisted the deal would include safeguards to prevent misuse by corporations, thus guaranteeing the right of EU governments to “pursue legitimate public policy objectives such as social, environmental, security, public health and safety” without the risk of being sued.

ISDS has been a long-established principle of multilateral trade deals between countries and is a process designed to ensure investors are not discriminated against by governments or biased judicial systems. It allows companies who believe they have been unfairly treated to take states to a neutral arbitration panel that can award compensation for loss of earnings.

But in recent years, campaigners claim, it has been used by large multinational companies to sue governments acting in the public interest. The Slovak Republic was forced to pay $22m (£13.4m) damages after the government reversed the liberalisation of its health-insurance market.

Campaigners say the arbitration panels are unaccountable and are not likely to assess issues of national interest when making decisions.

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, who tabled the parliamentary motion, said the move would “overturn decades of laws and regulations formed through democratic processes on both sides of the Atlantic”.

Former UK Labour minister John Healey, who chairs the British parliamentary group on EU-US trade and investment, said: “It is not clear ISDSs are justified at all when the agreement will be struck between countries with some of the most advanced and stable legal systems in the world.”

Frances O’Grady, TUC general secretary, said: “These clauses could thwart attempts by a future government to bring our health service back towards public ownership.”

Charlie Kronick, senior climate adviser at Greenpeace, said the group feared ISDS provisions could be used to prevent the EU from restricting imports of US diesel made from polluting tar sands in Canada.

But EU trade spokesman John Clancy said the fears of campaigners were entirely misplaced. “The sad irony is that the many critics of investment protection and in particular ISDS are actually arguing for us to maintain the status quo which is at the heart of the problem.” He added: “The EU wants to close down such loopholes in a future EU-US deal by spelling out what is and is not possible, improving transparency and creating modern, state-of-the art investment arrangements.”

The question which remains ignored by the EU Commission and EU Parliament  is how the EU can even  negotiate with a partner like the US, where most  of the political establishment is now indirectly on the payroll of multi-national and local corporations and which has a spy-network in place which is collecting personal data not only from EU-citizens, but also is able to extrapolate strategic negotiation information from the EU-trade negotiation team wherever they may be. 

To anyone with at least some intelligence these trade negotiations have, so far, not been carried out on a level playing field and the EU better take off their "blinders" .    

EU-Digest