European Parliament Committee Says No To TAFTA/TTIP Deal Without Respect For Data Privacy, But Fails To Offer Snowden Asylum

from the talking-tough dept

Earlier this week we mentioned that Edward Snowden has agreed in principle to contribute to the European Parliament's inquiry into the mass surveillance of EU citizens. The body leading that is the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) committee, which has been interviewing many other witnesses in order to formulate what the EU's response should be. Yesterday the LIBE committee met and agreed its final recommendations, which include some pretty dramatic demands -- like this one:

Parliament's consent to the final Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal with the US "could be endangered as long as blanket mass surveillance activities and the interception of communications in EU institutions and diplomatic representations are not fully stopped and an adequate solution for data privacy rights of EU citizens, including administrative and judicial redress is not found", MEPs say.

Parliament should therefore withhold its consent to the TTIP agreement unless it fully respects fundamental rights enshrined in the EU Charter, the text adds, stressing that data protection should be ruled out of the trade talks.

If the European Parliament agrees, that could be a big problem, because on the US side, there is an equally strong insistence that data protection must be included in any TAFTA/TTIP text. But the LIBE MEPs don't stop there; here are more potential bombshells:

MEPs call for the "immediate suspension" of the Safe Harbour privacy principles (voluntary data protection standards for non-EU companies transferring EU citizens' personal data to the US). These principles "do not provide adequate protection for EU citizens" say MEPs, who urge the US to propose new personal data transfer rules that meet EU data protection requirements.

The Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP) deal should also be suspended until allegations that US authorities have access to EU citizens' bank data outside the agreement are clarified, say MEPs. The EU-US data protection framework agreement to be struck in spring 2014 must ensure proper judicial redress for EU citizens whose personal data are transferred to the US, they add.

Without the Safe Harbor program, it will be illegal under European law for companies like Google and Facebook to take EU citizens' personal data outside the EU, which would make it hard to run those services there. Presumably this threat is designed to encourage the US authorities to come up with something better than the current Safe Harbor system, which essentially offers no protection for the personal data of EU citizens when it is transferred to the US.

One interesting proposal concerns whistleblowers:

The resolution urges the European Commission to examine whether a future EU law establishing a "European whistleblower protection programme" should also include other fields of EU competence "with particular attention to the complexity of whistleblowing in the field of intelligence". EU member states are also asked to consider granting whistleblowers international protection from prosecution.

But a big omission is the lack of any formal call to offer political asylum to Edward Snowden, something many people had hoped for. However, Euronews reports that the Rapporteur (subject expert) for this report, Claude Moraes, believes that offering asylum is not possible because of the way that political powers are apportioned between the European Union and its member states:

"The European Union does not have the power to grant asylum as the European Union, so this is something for individual member states," he told euronews. "And the issue of asylum within this report therefore does not become a relevant issue for the European Union."

Finally, the LIBE committee rapped a few national knuckles for complicity in the NSA's global surveillance activities:

The UK, France, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Poland should clarify the allegations of mass surveillance -- including potential agreements between intelligence services and telecoms firms on access to and exchange of personal data and access to transatlantic cables -- and their compatibility with EU laws, it says.

Other EU countries, in particular those participating in the "9-eyes" (UK, Denmark, France and the Netherlands) and "14-eyes" arrangements (those countries plus Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden) are also urged to review their national laws and practices governing the activities of intelligence services, so as to ensure that they are subject to parliamentary and judicial oversight and public scrutiny and that they comply with fundamental rights obligations.

MEPs deem bilateral "anti-spying" arrangements concluded or under negotiation between some EU countries (the UK, France and Germany) and the US as "counterproductive and irrelevant, due to the need for a European approach to this problem".

It's worth emphasizing that all these demands are only recommendations at this stage: the final vote in the European Parliament will take place on 12 March, and could see amendments to any of them, as well as deletions and additions (for example, the EU Greens have said that they will try to get the European Parliament to offer asylum to Snowden then.) Nonetheless, the report sends a very strong signal that MEPs on the LIBE committee are extremely unhappy about the revelations of mass surveillance being conducted across Europe. What exactly that translates into as far as real-world actions are concerned, remains to be seen.

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Filed Under: edward snowden, eu, european union, privacy, tafta, trade agreements, ttip

Global Trade Agreements: Unstoppable, Or Being Stopped?

from the big-question dept

The Berlin Forum on Global Politics, in collaboration with the Internet & Society Collaboratory and FutureChallenges.org of the Bertelsmann Stiftung, has put together an interesting collection of 22 wide-ranging essays dealing with TAFTA/TTIP, called "The Transatlantic Colossus" (freely available in .pdf, .epub, and .mobi file formats.) One of the essays, which compares TAFTA/TTIP with TPP, points out that we are witnessing an unprecedented level of activity in forging large-scale trade agreements:

The ongoing trend of proliferating bilateral and multilateral trade agreements has entered into a new stage with Japan's decision to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations and the launch of negotiations between the EU and the US to reach a comprehensive trade and investment agreement (TAFTA | TTIP). On top of that, the EU and Japan also started negotiating a bilateral trade agreement in April 2013. Due to their sheer size, these trade blocs have the potential for significant economic and geopolitical implications.

There's no doubt that there's plenty going on in this sphere -- moves to update NAFTA can be added to the list above -- but a fascinating article on the IP Osgoode site points out that if you look at the efforts to strengthen copyrights and patents in both the domestic and international arenas, there's another dynamic at work here:

coordinated activism against perceptions about increasing levels of IP protections is being led by a host of developing states as well as civil society critics in developed and developing countries. These groups are reacting to what they consider a proprietary ownership system over cultural and communicative processes that is deemed to serve the interests of dominant industries primarily located in developed states. These actors are seeking to "rebalance" the international IP system to meet the socioeconomic development objectives of a diverse set of stakeholders in developed and developing countries. They often advocate for legal and socio-legal reforms that they contend will stimulate public policy objectives for technological innovation and economic growth while addressing the economic, social, cultural, and development needs of users, citizens, and emerging business practices.

The increasingly contested nature of IP negotiations has resulted in a patchwork of international trade and IP agreements that are negotiated outside of established multilateral forums. In particular, the US and EU have been actively seeking arenas where they are better able to reach agreement on complex issues. However, the failure of international discussions – such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) – as well as American legislation – notably the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (the PROTECT IP Act, or PIPA) – have cast doubt on the viability of these exercises.

That tension between attempts to pin down the world in a set of massive, overlapping trade agreements and the widespread pushback against ever-more unbalanced copyright and patent systems can be seen in the recently-leaked TPP chapter, which shows the US completely isolated from the other nations in its demands for yet more extreme rights for copyright and patent holders. It will be interesting to see whether the measures dealing with online copyright and Net freedom are the spark that ignites widespread public opposition to TPP just as they were for ACTA.

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Filed Under: activism, tafta, tpp, trade agreements, ttip

Canadian Government Refuses To Release Any Text Of CETA, While Claiming It's Mostly Finished

from the something-to-hide? dept

Back in November, we reported that the EU and Canada were claiming that "a political agreement" on the key elements of the Canada-EU trade agreement, CETA, had been reached. One of the supposed reasons why the negotiations were being conducted in secret was that it was "obviously" not possible to release texts while talks were still going on -- even though that is precisely how WIPO operates. So, now that key parts of the CETA have been agreed upon, presumably the public will finally get to see at least those sections of the text, right? Apparently not, as the Council of Canadians found when it put in a freedom of information request to the Canadian government:

The federal government has denied an access to information request from the Council of Canadians for the working text of the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). The grassroots public advocacy organization is accusing the Conservative government of unnecessarily depriving Canadians of the information they need to pass judgement on CETA, and of any opportunity to alter the deal before it is signed.

"It's a new year, but we're seeing the same old secrecy from the Harper government. How is anyone expected to say yes or no to this EU deal if Ottawa is not prepared to release it publicly before CETA is signed, sealed and delivered?" asks Stuart Trew, trade campaigner with the Council of Canadians. "The Prime Minister is misleading Canadians by claiming the CETA negotiations are the most transparent in Canadian history. A fully redacted copy of the text would be more transparent than this."

This exposes nicely the dishonesty of governments around the world when they claim that regrettably they "have" to keep texts secret, but will release them just as soon as they can. Here, we have major parts of CETA that have been agreed upon and where there is no need to keep them secret -- apart, that is, from the real reason why there is no transparency: because the governments concerned know that once the public find out how they have been let down by their representatives, there will be widespread outrage. In a blatant attempt to stifle democratic debate, it has become standard practice with these trade agreements only to release the texts after they have been passed, and there's nothing that can be done about it.

As the Council of Canadians' trade campaigner points out:

"It is not OK to negotiate sweeping corporate rights deals like CETA behind closed doors and then to deny the public or parliament the opportunity to change anything about them before the deals are signed and passed into law," says Trew. "If the government is so proud of this deal they should gladly present it to Canadians for their approval before signing. Otherwise, the Conservatives could find CETA backfiring for them at election time."

That's certainly how it should work, but among the general public, awareness about the important knock-on consequences of agreements like CETA, TPP and TAFTA/TTIP remains low. And that's how the governments involved aim to keep it, not least by avoiding at all stages any kind of real transparency.

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Filed Under: canada, ceta, europe, stephen harper, tafta, tpp, trade agreements, transparency, ttip

European Commission Admits It Plans To Put 'Corporate Christmas List' Of IP Demands Into TAFTA/TTIP

from the acta's-back dept

A few months ago, we quoted the EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht, who is responsible for handling the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations on the European side, as saying:

"ACTA, one of the nails in my coffin. I'm not going to reopen that discussion. Really, I mean, I am not a masochist. I'm not planning to do that.

If the Commission advances new basic legislation, which I think she should, we will revisit the question, but I'm not going to do this by the back door".

Well, either that was just more misdirection, or he's not in control of his staff. Because we learn from a stunning report of a little-publicized meeting between corporate lobbyists and the EU's negotiator on intellectual monopolies, Pedro Velasco Martins, that putting many of the worst features of ACTA into TAFTA/TTIP is precisely what the European Commission has planned. Here's the background:

Taking place at the American Chamber of Commerce offices in Brussels, the purpose of the two hour exchange was to strategize between businesses and the Commission in order to make sure that the maximum level of new IP restrictions will be written into the treaty. Present at the meeting were representatives from a range of the very largest multinational corporations. Among these were TimeWarner, Microsoft, Ford, Eli Lilly, AbbVie (pharmaceutical, formerly Abbott) and the luxury conglomerate LMVH. The participant list also included representatives from Nike, Dow, Pfizer, GE, BSA and Disney - among others. Also present was Patrice Pellegrino from OHIM [Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market], the EU/Commission agency responsible for trade marks in the EU.

As you will notice, most of those companies are from the US. Nothing wrong that, of course, except when you consider the following:

Controversially, the supposedly neutral Commission negotiator and the OHIM representative not only defined themselves as allies with the businesses lobbyists. They went far beyond this and started to instruct the representatives in detail on how they should campaign to "educate" the public in order to maximise their outcome in terms of industry monopoly rights. In particular, concerns from elected representatives, such as the European Parliament -- as well as civil society criticisms about ever increasing intellectual property rights -- were to be kept out of the public debate.

Here's what the European Commission really wants to see in TAFTA/TTIP:

Commission negotiator Velasco Martins revealed the existence of a secret list of corporate demands for new intellectual property rights in the transatlantic treaty. Previously -- towards the public and the Parliament -- the Commission has created the impression that intellectual property rights will be downplayed. The only IP right mentioned has been geographical indications, a minor issue which few are concerned about. In reality, the Commission now revealed that they have received "quite a Christmas list of items" on IP from corporate lobbyists and that they are working to implement this list. The list has already been discussed with the US in several meetings, in person as well as online.

The Christmas list covers almost every major intellectual property right. On patents, industry had shown "quite an interest" especially on the procedures around the granting of new patents. On copyrights the industry wants to have the "same level of protection" in the US and EU; in reality this always means harmonization up which results in more restrictions for the general public. On plant variety rights the pharma sector has lobbied for "higher levels" of protection. On trademarks the corporate lobbyists had made classification-related requests to the Commission. Additionally there had been a lot of interest in trade secrets.

There's also stuff from our old friend ACTA -- stricter enforcement:

According to the negotiator, the most repeated request on the Christmas list was in "enforcement". Concerning this, companies had made requests to "improve and formalize" as well as for the authorities to "make statements". The Commission negotiator said that although joint 'enforcement statements' do not constitute "classical trade agreement language" -- a euphemism for things that do not belong in trade agreements -- the Commission still looks forward to "working in this area".

That seems to go against explicit promises made earlier by the European Commission:

Since the beginning of the TTIP negotiating process, it is very clear that the eventual agreement on intellectual property rights will not include elements that were controversial in the context of ACTA. For example, the ACTA provisions on IPR enforcement in the digital environment (ACTA articles 27.2 to 27.4) will not be part of the negotiations. Neither will ACTA's provisions on criminal sanctions.

The report of the meeting contains many other fascinating insights into the real thinking of the European Commission. For example, apparently there is some relief that people are focusing on the horrors of corporate sovereignty, since that has allowed work on the "corporate Christmas list" to proceed unnoticed. There was also a warning that it is probably only a matter of time before details get out:

"Lots of people are waiting for the first slip, the first leak"

In the wake of the good things that have already flowed from Edward Snowden's leaks, and the enhanced status of whistleblowers today, that seems increasingly likely to happen. Finally, there was a useful hint of how the European Commission is going to attempt to justify bringing back ACTA in TAFTA/TTIP:

A recurring theme was that the public needs to be re-educated to understand the value of industry monopoly rights.

According to Pellegrino, the key to doing this is a number of pro-IP reports that will or have been released by OHIM.

One recent report was highlighted. It claims that every fourth job in the EU only exists because of intellectual property regulations.

That would presumably be this report, which claims ridiculously that:

IPR-intensive industries contribute

26% of employment and
39% of GDP in the EU

Techdirt wrote about this back in October, where we pointed out that it obtains these unrealistically high figures by including a whole range of industries that use things like copyright and patents only in the most limited and tangential way. Expect to see more of these exaggerated claims, based on similarly shoddy methodologies, appearing in the next few months.

That OHIM is putting out such propaganda isn't perhaps too surprising -- it's just a form marketing for its activities. But what is shocking is that an OHIM representative, along with the most senior EU negotiator for intellectual monopolies, should be offering detailed advice to US companies on how to subvert the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations by trying to keep the dissenting views of Members of the European Parliament and EU civic groups out of the debate. That's a direct assault on fair and open discourse, and ultimately undermines European democracy at a time when many are calling into question the entire idea of the European Union.

At the very least, the European Commission should set up a formal inquiry into what happened at this meeting, to make sure such blatant favoritism is avoided in future. If it doesn't, we'll know definitively that not only is it happy to see corporates on both sides of the Atlantic given preferential treatment during TAFTA/TTIP, but that it really doesn't care who knows. Meanwhile, those who took to the streets of Europe to fight off ACTA last year may want to start getting their boots ready.

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Filed Under: acta, copyright, karel de gucht, patents, pedro velasco martins, tafta, trade agreements, treaty, ttip
Companies: abbvie, bsa, disney, dow, eli lilly, ford, ge, lvmh, microsoft, nike, pfizer, time warner, us chamber of commerce

Holy See (The Pope) Criticizes TPP And TAFTA/TTIP In WTO Speech

from the nobody-expects-the-Spanish-Inquisition-or-Holy-See dept

There's no shortage of critics of massive trade agreements like TPP and TAFTA/TTIP, but today saw strong condemnation from a very unexpected quarter: the Holy See, often, if erroneously, equated with the Vatican. Whatever the jurisdictional differences, the statement delivered by His Excellency Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, Apostolic Nuncio, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva at the 9th Session of the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization presumably comes with the full approval of Pope Francis himself. We can assume that because of the extremely controversial statements it contains, which would have required approval at the highest level. Things like this:

While a minority is experiencing exponential growth in wealth, the gap is widening to separate the vast majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and of financial speculation. Consequently, there is an outright rejection of the right of States, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. An even worse development is that such policies are sometimes locked in through trade rules negotiated at the WTO or in bilateral or regional FTAs.

The statement then goes on to criticize the move away from multilateral trade agreements of the kind traditionally drawn up at the WTO, to new-style "mega-regional trade agreements", routinely negotiated in secret:

Currently there is a clear tendency to further enlarge these RTAs [Regional Trade Agreements] to form mega-regional trade agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Certainly, the enlargement of regional trade agreements is a step towards further trade liberalization but we have to bear in mind that these agreements inevitably threaten the desirability to reach an agreement on a truly multilateral basis. In fact, by entering a regional trade agreement a country reduces the incentives to extend its efforts on trade liberalization at a multilateral level.

Here's why the Holy See believes RTAs and mega-RTAs are problematic:

we know that only the multilateral system is a clear, equitable system that provides effective guarantees for small and poor countries that tend to be penalized in a Regional Trade Agreement where it is asymmetric. Among the most damaging concessions developing countries make in regional and bilateral agreements are those enhancing the monopolies on life-saving medicines, which reduce access and affordability and those that provide excessive legal rights to foreign investors, limiting the policy space for nations to promote sustainable and inclusive development.

"Enhancing the monopolies on life-saving medicines" is a clear swipe at TPP, which aims to do precisely that, with what are likely to be terrible and even fatal consequences for the poor in the Pacific region. And the phrase "excessive legal rights to foreign investors, limiting the policy space for nations to promote sustainable and inclusive development" is obviously a reference to the imposition of corporate sovereignty clauses in both TPP and TAFTA/TTIP.

It's unlikely that the Holy See's intervention at the WTO meeting in Bali will have any direct effects on either the TPP or TAFTA/TTIP negotiations, but it does signal two important facts. First, that Pope Francis is emerging as a passionate defender of the world's poor, and one who is not afraid to speak truth to even the most powerful nations; and secondly, that resistance to the most unjust and unjustifiable aspects of TPP and TAFTA/TTIP continues to grow.

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Filed Under: access to medicine, holy see, patents, pope, tafta, tpp, trade agreements, ttip, wto

TAFTA/TTIP: What Price Transparency?

from the one-law-for-the-rich,-one-law-for-the-poor dept

One of the key problems with TAFTA/TTIP is the same one that plagued ACTA and has recently been highlighted with TPP: the complete lack of any meaningful transparency. However much the negotiators may claim that transparency is important to them, there's no evidence to support that view. Or perhaps the politicians think the existence of conferences like one being held in Brussels next January provide enough opportunities for anyone who wants to convey their views to the EU's Chief Negotiator, say. He'll be attending, along with several other senior European Commission officials, according to the program.

Unlike many overpriced conferences, the costs for this one seem quite reasonable: it charges less for NGOs and not-for-profit organizations than for corporate visitors, and will try to accommodate those who can't afford even that:

We realise the importance of including all groups in the discussions at our events, and will always do our best to ensure that nobody is excluded due to not being able to afford the conference fee.

If you find the charge for tickets a barrier to attending, please let us know and we will endeavour to come to an arrangement to facilitate your participation. Please note however that this applies to individuals, unfunded academics/students and representatives of small charities, not businesses, individuals funded by an organisation, or larger charities/not-for-profit organisations.

That's to be commended, because otherwise members of the public whose means are very limited are inevitably excluded from such important opportunities to make their views known to key political figures in the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations (although they still have the cost of getting to Brussels...) But there's one area where money most certainly talks at this conference. The "Sponsorship Prospectus" (pdf) spells out some of things that can be bought. For example, for a mere €4000, you can be "Exclusive Host of VIP & Speaker Dinner" with the following benefits:

Opportunity to speak during dinner debate
Three-course dinner for speakers and high-level invited guests
Three seats at dinner reserved for your representatives or guests
Corporate identity displayed in dining area during dinner
Corporate identity included on menu cards
Full page advert in programme
3 complimentary delegate places

Then there are really major sponsorships that aren't even up for grabs -- things like becoming the conference's "Platinum Sponsor", which turns out to be the Business Software Alliance (BSA). I wonder what the BSA receives in exchange for that sponsorship: special access to some of the key people taking part, certainly, and probably the EU's Chief Negotiator too. Given that the BSA was originally in favor of SOPA, we can guess what its representatives at this conference will be saying to him when they meet.

And that's the real problem here. Those able to pay for sponsorship are granted a level of direct and concentrated access that the mere conference plebs -- even if admitted free of charge thanks to the organizer's laudable generosity -- will never enjoy. That might not matter if there were plenty of other ways for the public to make their views known to the TAFTA/TTIP negotiators, but as we know, there aren't any.

Which means that the vast disparity in influence that exists between the rich and powerful who already have an inside track to TAFTA/TTIP officials, and the hundreds of millions of people in whose name the negotiations are supposedly being held, will be made even greater by events such as the one taking place in Brussels next year. That's not the fault of the conference organizers, of course, but it's certainly is the fault of the US and EU politicians that mouth platitudes about TAFTA/TTIP's transparency while failing to put into practice.

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Filed Under: access, negotiations, sponsorships, tafta, tpp, trade agreements, transparency, ttip
Companies: bsa

The USTR's Revolving Door With Copyright And Patent Maximalists Removes All Credibility

from the it's-all-about-jobs...-their-own dept

Tim Lee, over at the Washington Post's The Switch, has an excellent, detailed look at why the USTR seems to think that patent and copyright maximalism is in the best interests of America. There are two key reasons, which I'll paraphrase as (1) the employees at USTR have strong connections to copyright and patent maximalists, and there's a constant revolving door between USTR and IP maximalists, and (2) they're basically ignorant of how the digital world works today.

The ignorance issue is disturbing, but somewhat understandable. As we pointed out just recently, the USTR relies heavily on Industry Trade Advisory Committees (ITACs), which are deeply involved in these things. Members get access to the documents -- much more access than even Congress, and certainly a lot more access than the public which gets none at all. The IP ITAC is almost entirely made up of legacy industry players who come from a different era, and who know little about today's innovation. In fact, they tend to fight against innovation. As Lee notes, the USTR used to work mostly with exporters -- companies who ship stuff to foreign countries, and their general outlook on everything is from that perspective. But that makes no sense when you're talking about information. Rather than crafting export policies, they're creating information infrastructure policy, when the very flow of information is critical to innovation. And they simply don't get that. At all.

Lee also reports (for the first time publicly) how the USTR flat out rejected a recent attempt to put copyright law expert Andrew Bridges on the IP ITAC. Bridges is the person you should thank for having music in your pocket, because he defended the legality of the first MP3 player when the RIAA tried to sue it out of existence. He's also worked closely with a ton of internet companies and knows better than just about anyone I know how innovation works these days. You may also recognize him for fighting the US government's bogus attempt to seize a hip hop blog. Even though his expertise is copyright law, the USTR said he could only join the "Information and Communications Technologies" ITAC, which is not his specialty, so he refused the pointless appointment.

But the really concerning part is the insane revolving door between IP maximalist industry players and the USTR. Lee details a very long list of folks who have gone in both directions, between the USTR and the pharmaceutical industry, as well as between the USTR and various copyright maximalist organizations. Here's just a snippet.

The lead American negotiator was Ralph Ives, who was promoted to Assistant USTR for Pharmaceutical Policy soon after the negotiations concluded. He was aided by Claude Burcky, Deputy Assistant USTR for Intellectual Property. Less than three months after the Australia agreement was signed, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that both men would take jobs at pharmaceutical or medical device companies. Their new employers stood to benefit from some of the pro-patent-holder provisions of the treaty. Ives took a job at AdvaMed, a trade group representing medical device manufacturers. Burcky moved to the pharmaceutical and medical device company Abbott Labs.

Since then, Abbott has hired two other USTR veterans, Andrea Durkin and Karen Hauda, according to the women's LinkedIn pages. Another USTR official, Kira Alvarez, has gone through the revolving door twice over the last 15 years. Her LinkedIn profile indicates that she served at USTR from 2000 to 2003, spent four years at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, and then returned to USTR in 2008 as Deputy Assistant USTR for Intellectual Property Enforcement. She was there for five years before she took a job at AbbVie, a pharmaceutical firm that spun off from Abbott earlier this year.

According to his official biography at the site of the Biotechnology Industry Associaiton, Joseph Damond "was chief negotiator of the historic U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade agreement" during his 12 years at USTR. He then spent five years at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America before moving to BIO. Justin McCarthy went through the revolving door in the other direction. According to a USTR press release, McCarthy was responsible for intellectual property issues at the pharmaceutical company Pfizer from 2003 to 2005 before he was hired at USTR. He now works at a lobbying firm.

And that's just the basics. Of course, this is the very nature of the USTR. After all, their boss, Michael Froman, was once described by Reuters as "one of the most egregious examples... of the way the revolving door works between business and government generally." So that's the guy who sets the tone there, though Froman's only been at the USTR for a brief time. This culture is pervasive.

And it's a real problem. The USTR doesn't seem to recognize that what's best for a few large industry players who might give the USTR employees jobs a few months down the road, can be disastrous for both the American public and the American economy. I've had USTR people try to defend what they do to me by claiming that "it's our job to support US trade interests." But that's taking an excessively dangerous view of what their role really is. It's a myopically narrow view of what the US's trade interests are, based on a laughably narrowminded group of individuals whose interests may be quite harmful to the wider US public and economy.

The USTR may claim it's trying to help promote American jobs, but it really looks like it's their own jobs that are most important to them.

Either way, this is even more evidence that the USTR simply has no credibility on issues like copyright and patents. There's no reason why this "free trade" agreement should include intellectual property in the first place, since it's the very antithesis of free trade. But now that it's quite clear that the USTR is impossibly biased on this issue, it's even more reason to simply strip out the IP chapter entirely.

Filed Under: acta, copyright, exporters, lobbyists, patents, pharmaceuticals, revolving door, soft corruption, tafta, tpp, trade agreements, ttip, ustr

Resistance Grows To Inclusion Of Corporate Sovereignty In Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA)

from the just-get-rid-of-it dept

Remember CETA, the Canada-EU trade agreement, officially known as "Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement"? You could be forgiven for losing track of where things were with the negotiations, which have been dragging on since 2009, but a kind of milestone was passed recently:

Commission President José Manuel Barroso and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper have today reached a political agreement on the key elements of a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) after months of intense negotiations between EU Trade Commissioner De Gucht and Canadian trade Minister Ed Fast. It will be the first free trade agreement between the European Union and a G8 country.

Despite that "political agreement", there still remains plenty to be done, as this CBC article explains:

Some areas of the agreement still need drafting, while others need fine-tuning, reporters learned through a briefing. But the most contentious points have been settled. The agreement text then has to be drafted, run past lawyers and translated into 24 languages for the 28 EU countries to examine. The document Harper and Barroso signed Friday is an agreement in principle and full ratification is likely two years away.

Although the CBC post claims "the most contentious points have been settled", that's not true for one of the most controversial areas: corporate sovereignty, officially known as investor-state dispute settlement -- and resistance is building. For example, the European Trade Union Confederation, which claims to represent more than 60 million workers in Europe, "strongly opposes the inclusion of ISDS in CETA." And as negotiations on the ISDS chapter begin, over 80 organizations have put together a "transatlantic statement" calling for the corporate sovereignty chapter to be withdrawn from CETA completely:

As European and Canadian trade officials meet again in Brussels today to continue negotiating an investment protection chapter in the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), transatlantic civil society groups are demanding that this chapter be removed entirely as an affront to democracy, an attack on the independent judiciary, and a threat to climate change and our shared environment.

The CETA "will include a controversial and unnecessary investment protection chapter and investor-to-state dispute settlement process (ISDS) that a growing number of countries are rejecting for good reasons," says the transatlantic statement, which is endorsed by more than 80 organizations in the European Union, Canada and Quebec. "These excessive corporate protections, built into thousands of investment treaties and free trade agreements, serve no social or economic purpose other than to undermine our democratic rights to decide public policy and public interest regulation."

The accompanying statement (pdf) provides a useful summary of why the inclusion of corporate sovereignty in so-called trade agreements is so worrying. Here are some of the main points:

CETA will permanently freeze existing rules governing investment and then strictly limit government regulation of services, investment, natural resources, environmental protection and public safety measures in the interests of corporations. All existing government policies in all these areas that have not been excluded from the agreement up front will be covered, making it difficult for countries to introduce new services or regulations in the future that affect however modestly the investment opportunities of foreign companies and investors.

In fact, changes to regulations are still possible, but the ISDS chapter means in practice that they will always be in favor of corporations, not the public. That's because the intentional asymmetry of corporate sovereignty allows companies to sue a government for unlimited sums when they don't like changes in regulations, but the public has no equivalent rights. This naturally encourages governments to listen to corporations and ignore its citizens.

There is no comfort in claims by the Commission or Canadian government that "frivolous" claims, or challenges to environmental policy, will be filtered out. Despite efforts in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to limit what kinds of government decisions might violate an investor's minimum standards of treatment or other investment chapter protections, Canada continues to face investor-state disputes attacking environmental measures that affect national and foreign investors in exactly the same way (e.g. a partial moratorium on shale gas extraction in Quebec).

The declaration has a good explanation why this happens:

Likewise, we are not satisfied by efforts to limit the meaning of "indirect expropriation" so that legitimate public welfare objectives should be immune from investor challenges. The final determination is always made by the private investment tribunals themselves, and these unaccountable tribunals have a built-in bias toward the interests of multinational corporations.

Techdirt readers may recall that it was precisely this concept of indirect "expropriation" that Eli Lilly invoked when suing Canada under NAFTA's ISDS section. As the declaration rightly notes, the lawyers who make up ISDS tribunals are inherently biased in favor of corporations because they can represent the same companies in other corporate sovereignty cases -- an extraordinary conflict of interest. Finally, the declaration points out why it is really important to remove the ISDS chapter from CETA before the final ratification:

Whatever the EU gets away with in CETA, including on investment protection, will just create a new ground floor on which multinational corporations will build even more.

The way all these agreements work is that they seek to take the results of previous treaties as a baseline, and then go beyond them -- but always in favor of big business, never to the benefit of the public. That means one of the best ways of fighting corporate sovereignty in TAFTA/TTIP is to make sure it's taken out of CETA.

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Filed Under: canada, ceta, corporate sovereignty, eu, investor state dispute settlement, isds, trade agreements

How Much Does Gold-Plated Corporate Sovereignty Cost? $1 Billion Or About 2% Of A Developing Country's GDP

from the taking-from-the-poor,-giving-to-the-rich dept

Last week we wrote about the rising threat of corporate sovereignty, known more obscurely as "investor-state dispute settlement", that allows companies to sue countries for alleged loss of future profits. Just how grave that threat is for developing nations can be gauged by the following, reported by Tico Times:

Canadian gold-mining company Infinito Gold Ltd. announced its intentions to go forward with a $1 billion lawsuit against Costa Rica over the retracted Las Crucitas open-pit gold mining concession in northern Costa Rica, in a statement released on Friday.

The contract was withdrawn for largely environmental reasons:

Costa Rica and the Canadian mining company have been ensnarled in a protracted legal battle over the canceled Las Crucitas project in Cutris de San Carlos, Alajuela, since environmentalists and locals decried the loss of virgin forest and health concerns over leeching chemicals contaminating drinking water.

Initially, the company fought the decision using local courts, but when it lost there, it made use of corporate sovereignty to take its complaint to a supra-national tribunal, the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID):

Infinito has been rattling its saber over a potential ICSID arbitration after the company lost its appeal in Costa Rica's Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, known as the Sala IV, in November 2010.

Now, $1 billion is a lot of money by anyone's reckoning. But for a country like Costa Rica, whose Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is estimated to be around $46 billion for 2012, an award of $1 billion against it would represent about 2% of the country's entire annual economic activity, in a land where 25% of the population live below the poverty line.

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Filed Under: corporate sovereignty, costa rica, investor state dispute settlement, isds, trade agreements
Companies: infinito gold

How NSA Spying On Angela Merkel May Scuttle TAFTA/TTIP Trade Agreement

from the another-good-deed-by-Snowden dept

There's been plenty of attention paid to the news of the past week or so about the NSA spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone. While some still insist this is no big deal, the eventual consequences could be a very big deal. First off, remember that it was just a few months ago that (in the wake of the initial Snowden leaks), the US and Germany had made a silly pledge, which no one believed, that they wouldn't spy on each other. That "agreement" is already being put to the test.

As we discussed last week, the real "casualty" from all of these discussions may actually be that America can't get away with being a massive hypocrite anymore, despite so much of its foreign and domestic policy being built around being able to get away with just that. And, a large part of that is how the US pushes other countries into very questionable trade agreements -- another thing that we've been following for years. And those two things may be on a collision course. For quite some time now, we've been discussing the big trade agreement that the EU and the US are working towards, called TAFTA or TTIP. But one of the lesser noticed points about the revelations of the spying on Merkel is that many people in Germany are saying that negotiations on this agreement should be put on hold:

The chancellor's office is also now considering the possibility that the much-desired trans-Atlantic free trade agreement could fail if the NSA affair isn't properly cleared up. Since the latest revelations came out, some 58 percent of Germans say they support breaking off ongoing talks, while just 28 percent are against it. "We should put the negotiations for a free-trade agreement with the US on ice until the accusations against the NSA have been clarified," says Economy Minister Ilse Aigner, a member of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats.

There are many reasons why TAFTA/TTIP is looking like a bad deal anyway, having nothing to do with the NSA spying, but if the Snowden docs lead to that agreement being put "on ice" for a while, that seems like another useful outcome.

Filed Under: angela merkel, nsa, nsa surveillance, tafta, trade agreements, trust, ttip