The treaties themselves are public, and are voted on.
The interim negotiating documents are closely-guarded secrets, because trade negotiations will require give-to-get concessions from some industries, who would lobby aggressively to avoid being singled out.
On the other hand, negotiators are pressured to come to some agreement, and a "compromise" halfway between the global consensus and one lone holdout isn't a true compromise -- it's extortion by a global power.
If the secrecy of the documents is supposed to protect that kind of extortion by major powers -- for instance, on the part of US negotiators insisting that the rest of the world honor US IP standards -- then they should be publicly named and shamed, not hidden by "the process", under the guise that their all-or-nothing extortion is a reasonable practice.
I think it's very likely that the secrecy is meant to hide bad actions on the part of some negotiators representing powerful interests, and not for the true benefit of the constituents the negotiators are (theoretically) representing. I think the entirety of the fast tracking process in the US (and other nations), the secrecy around the negotiations, etc is at the behest of and for the benefit of major powers extorting other people, and shouldn't be respected, at all.
Do you have some reasons to suppose that it's otherwise, given the nature of the drafts we've seen and leaked comments from negotiators suggesting that the US negotiating team is attempting to extort the world in to accepting the (rather ridiculous) US IP position?
I think you're referring to the TPP here, not TTIP, which is the agreement being discussed in the article.
That TPP is an attempt to coerce Asian countries into adopting US-friendly IP laws is surely one of the most poorly-kept secrets in geopolitics. It's the stated purpose of the treaty. It's why the US is spending the time and effort on it.
So I'm not clear on what "naming and shaming" you're referring to, or why it hasn't (a) already been accomplished or (b) will easily be accomplished once the treaty goes into public review.
Making something public by putting it somewhere extremely inconvenient to see is not making it public. If that were the case, my genitals would be considered quite public at the moment. Even though I'd rather you not see them, they are not locked in a single room. Even if I had photos of them on a device, which I would gladly share with people in person, that STILL does not make them public.
I guess once the negotiations have ended, the full text will be available on the EU website, as many position statements already are. After that, many national governments will have to vote on it, and I guess you can consider those public acts too. I guess that's as much public as you can get, short of printing it up on every available wall.
Some industries are lobbying aggressively. You're right that, in principle, the negotiations should be kept secret from the public until the terms of the deals are ready to be voted on. However you are forgetting that 'the public' ought to include corporate interests (it largely does not - they are party to the negotiations).
That's true, but it's also true that labor is a party as well, as are many NGOs.
If you think about it, it's not very practical to craft a trade agreement with no input from industry. You just want to be very selective about which industries get to provide input and when.
The "democratic safeguard" part of this process should occur at the end, when unfair or broken trade agreements are unceremoniously rejected by legislatures. If legislatures did their jobs, the incentives to manipulate trade agreements would vanish: it would be a whole lot of time and effort spent for nothing.
You're getting two different sets of documents confused.
The negotiating documents --- the early drafts of the treaty, which are not binding --- are certainly not public. They are closely guarded secrets; that secrecy exists to protect the "integrity" of the negotiating process, for a very narrow definition of "integrity" that mostly means "minimized direct lobbying".
But the treaties themselves have to be ratified to become binding law. They are published, for public review, before that happens.
Wikileaks is effectively asking for people to leak the negotiating documents.
My understanding is that after the treaty is negotiated, the parliaments can just vote "yes" or "no" for the "whole package" (with the pressure to yes, as in "hey we've spent years to negotiate it!").
That is correct. Legislatures do not get line-item veto over trade agreements.
The agreement itself is public, usually for several months, prior to that vote.
I'm not sure why I'm meant to care about the "pressure" legislators feel to vote one way or the other on the acts. That's their job. They begged to have that job. They don't get to make excuses.
He is not the only person that claims that. In order to become law, the TTIP would have to be ratified by the Senate in the US and the EU Council of Ministers and EU Parliament in the EU. At the time it comes up for ratification it becomes public and is debated.
While it's being negotiated it's not public. I have no problem with that, any more than I have a problem with the authors of legislation drafting a bill in private before submitting it to the legislature for consideration, or the cabinet discussions of a government being private until a policy is settled upon and presented to the public.
The problem comes into play when treaties and laws are negotiated in private committees and then foisted upon the general legislative bodies with very little time for debate or review.
Creating opposition takes time and by not allowing that time, the whole process becomes distinctly less democratic.
"After a proposed draft was leaked in March 2014,[5] the European Commission launched a public consultation on a limited set of clauses and in January 2015 published parts of an overview.[6]"
Otherwise you would already earn 100000 EUR from Wikileaks by posting that link?
TTIP would be the EU & US standardizing plutocracy interoperability. Perhaps there are some proposed rollbacks of agriculture, public health and safety regulations on both sides of the Atlantic that would upset people: GMOs, labeling and ag inspection. Because TTIP's public goal is claimed to make trade "easier" by having more similar, common regulations for US products sold in the EU and vice-versa.
"Mr Bush's comments came barely a month after his administration took Europe's ban on GM crops to the World Trade Organisation, saying the moratorium was a barrier to trade."
"The European parliament today lifted the ban on genetically modified foods, instead choosing to impose a strict labelling regime that could stave off a trade war with the US."
I'm split on GMO, having friends in biotech plant biological sciences. I think there are real fears of dependence on too few crops and unforeseen effects on other organisms. Some other fears may not be borne out. The main objection is that it's gambling with our health and the planet if not done with great care. Perhaps GM can be done limited, done carefully and gradually but I also know that China and Korea will do whatever they want.
There is a good podcast by planetmoney explaining it. Mostly it is because there are so many industries and interests touched that regardless of what you negotiate, there will be public outrage and pressure on the negotiators which make it much harder to reach an agreement. If that is the case though, I am not sure whether an agreement must be reached...
"Wikileaks crowdfunding €100,000 reward for TTIP secrets"
As as the background on TTIP, they write:
"Together with the TTIP, these treaties (Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA)) represent the "Three Big T's", affecting 53 countries, 1.6 billion people and covering two thirds of the global economy. They aim to create a new international legal regime allowing transnational corporations to bypass domestic courts, evade environmental protections, police the internet on behalf of the content industry, limit the availability of affordable generic medicines, and drastically curtail each country's legislative sovereignty. Of the "Three Big T's", the TTIP remains the least exposed to public scrutiny, and the most significant to the interests of the European public."
"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"."
"In an interview last week, Stuart Eizenstat, co-chair of the Transatlantic Business Council – instrumental in driving the process – was asked if companies whose products had been banned by regulators would be able to sue [see footnote]. Yes. "If a suit like that was brought and was successful, it would mean that the country banning the product would have to pay compensation to the industry involved or let the product in." Would that apply to the European ban on chicken carcasses washed with chlorine, a controversial practice permitted in the US? "That's one example where it might.""
For health, safety, food and drug rules/regs: It's a crying shame that the arguably higher standard of two different reg frameworks, based on science where possible, isn't the default, moral choice. Instead, the focus seems to be money and lawsuits first, consumers maybe.
I don't understand this comment. It almost seems like you're suggesting that no negotiation involving the US can involve "science" in any true sense, because we once had a very dumb President.
That doesn't seem like a substantive discussion to the conversation, so you must mean something else. What was it?
Specifically, GM is presented by Monsanto et al (and in the linked article by G.W. Bush) as "scientifically non-dangerous" because the purpose of most of the modifications is not stated. The modifications are promoted as making the plants "resistant" hiding the fact that the resistance is to the pesticides developed by Monsanto.
The whole IP aspect of GM is also intentionally not mentioned. Bush mentions the benefits "to Africa" whereas the poorest countries get the worst aspects of GM exactly because of IP rights which are being kept by Monsanto et al.
"Science" in that context is just a word used to induce the good feeling, the same way "think of the children" is.
You're arguing something else: weaponized PR FUD "science." I was talking about the value of peer-reviewed, best known current time advice from respectable scientists and subject matter experts having more of a say in shaping public policy than either money or igorance alone. The times have changed some thankfully past the Cheney years, but the democratic operating system needs some patches to prevent the usurping the public interest.
I meant what I said. There is rarely enough consideration given to science (non NIPCC) and subject matter experts (non PR shills) in the full lifecycle of public policy: authoring, negotiation, implementation and revision. Special interest bias currently has purchased more than it's fair share of overriding influence. See also: Merchants of Doubt
I fully agree with you. But note that it's not that we can't call "science" when, for example, the tobacco industry finances some scientific research. It's how these particular research results are obtained (if they are bad science) or how they are used that we have to care.
And how "science" word can be used for something not automatically positive, we have both G. W. Bush example I quoted and the examples from "Merchants of Doubt" that you mention.
Sure we can because dressed up Cato report clones "addendums" aren't science. Exposing the crap and bias is how to keep it real. Otherwise, inventing new names is passing the buck from critical thinking, awareness and fact-checking. They're the PR problem, not the scientific method. Most of the legit scientific communities needs to get better at/hire PR to trash the crap and the talking head charlatans. Emperors new clothes lingo doesn't remove the jerks that condone personal threats to climate scientists.
It doesn't appear that the user api is discussing the "non binding" variant of the agreements. Once these agreements are secretly made and they exit the "look from my hand only, no photographs, no copies allowed" "reading rooms" they are binding but then it's too late to react (by the definition of them being binding). The problem is that the interested parties weren't even allowed to have their own copy of them, even less to discuss the exact texts with others, as there are no copies.
The last time I've read about such a "secure room" and the computer setup, it was the way how CIA falsified to the congressmen their data related to the torture:
"Now, after noting the disparity between the official CIA response to the committee study and the Internal Panetta Review, the committee staff securely transported a printed portion of the draft Internal Panetta Review from the committee’s secure room at the CIA-leased facility to the secure committee spaces in the Hart Senate Office Building."
I think I understand your argument, but I think it's just excuse-making by legislators.
The agreements must be voted into law to become binding.
The agreements are typically published, for public review, for many months prior to that vote.
There is nothing in these trade agreements so prohibitively complex that a legislator's office --- reasonably well funded in the US --- can't read and generate an opinion on it.
The reality, I think, is that most US legislators want to vote "yes" on these treaties. They're jobs bills, and the US has an overwhelming advantage in trade negotiations due to our market power, so the odds of them being slanted against our interests are very low.
There are very good reasons not to vote for the bills --- for instance, in the case of the TPP, you might be worried about stricter IP laws preventing people from obtaining the best possible medical care. But those issues primarily affect people who will never vote.
So instead, the legislators wave their hands and shout "ONOZ SECRET LAWS" and pretend that the treaties are a fait accompli, which saves them the trouble of actually making a stand on the merits.
The situation might be very different for smaller countries (I don't know really anything about how treaties are ratified in Europe). But for countries with the market and political clout of, say, Germany or France, it seems unlikely that the dynamics are that much different.
And the topic of the articles linked is that the negotiation process as it is performed is against the interests of those from whom it is being hidden.
Your comments on this thread are right there for everyone to read. Just a few comments up, you're asserting that the T-TIP process is hiding binding treaties. Now you appear to be pretending that was never your argument.
> Just a few comments up, you're asserting that the T-TIP process is hiding binding treaties.
I don't agree. Please quote where I wrote that with these words. If you mean "agreements" I refer to the current state of the "agreements" which was all the time the topic of the articles linked, not the "final all-or-nothing state of them" that you want to introduce, and that for TTIP don't exist at the moment, so nobody can write about them at all or comment them. I'm fascinated that you introduced to the discussion something that doesn't exist and try to sell that once that exists, in whichever form, it will magically negate the problems currently written about. But I won't discuss more as the article went away from the first page.
Any time two countries sign a treaty they're agreeing to abide by a common set of rules on some particular topic. Countries have been making treaties with each other for about 800 years without destroying the concept of sovereignty. Indeed, if a sovereign power can't enter into binding legal agreements then I would argue it's constitutionally deficient.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear in a democracy.
Turns out people have to be transparent to Governments, but Governments what to be opaque. This is not a democracy.