Politicians can only view secret trade pact in special viewing room | Hacker News Reader

Politicians can only view secret trade pact in special viewing room

arstechnica.com

8 pointsjoseflavio4 comments

This whole T-agreements are way beyond madness.

Depends on wheter you believe in multi-country trade pacts or not. The failure of the Doha Round showed further emphasized that they have to be negotiated in secret, but of course are made public when that's finished and it's time to ratify them or not.

Experience shows they have to be voted up or down without allowing each of the 535 Congresscritters a change to amend it, i.e. force a renegotiation with the other pact members, which won't happen since they've already taken political hits once it became public.

If neither of these process details are acceptable to you, then multi-country trade pacts are not acceptable to you, and a lot of potential compromises where e.g. country A makes a concession that helps country B, which makes one which helps country C, which makes one which helps country A, when no (new) bilateral concessions are possible won't happen.

This of course says nothing about the content of any particular agreement, but that's a separate issue from process.

I have to question whether secret negotiation is separate from content. If you want it to be really separate from content, you have to keep it from being a mechanism for inserting horrors that hide among the pages of a treaty nobody will read and understand.

For example if you limited each treaty to 10 provisions of 10 pages each then that would make the document understandable, AND it would incentivise the backers of important provisions to shut out the garbage if the garbage will sink the whole deal.

As it is we get at least hundreds of pages of garbage hiding among thousands of pages of soporific minutia.

I get the impression that treaties are studied a lot more closely than the now typical 1,000+ page bills, in part because they come from the executive, they don't come with the understanding that "the leadership wants you to vote for this bill they drafted". More of the tension between branches of the government that our Founders were fond of.

Didn't the (Democratic back then) Congress fail to ratify at least several of the last few treaties they were presented with? When was the last successful one??? These things tend to have lots of enemies, I have some hope these new ones, assuming negotiations are even successful (only the secrecy gives any hope for that, and I just found out on Wikipedia that the Millennium Round between Doha and Uruguay didn't even get off the ground), will get examined carefully enough. Certainly the ground has been prepared.

For that matter, are we sure the language is going to be that ugly? Here's it for the Uruguay round https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/legal_e.htm and I drilled down to this bit on copyright IP: https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_04_e.htm (all IP here: https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_01_e.htm).

Agriculture tends to be one of the worst areas, here's the first of two pages: https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/14-ag_01_e.htm Ugly, but not particularly opaque. E.g.:

4. (a) A Member shall not be required to include in the calculation of its Current Total AMS and shall not be required to reduce:

(i) product-specific domestic support which would otherwise be required to be included in a Member’s calculation of its Current AMS where such support does not exceed 5 per cent of that Member’s total value of production of a basic agricultural product during the relevant year; and....

Particularly good is there's no "this line in this law is changed to....".

And let's not forget that in the US treaties can do only so much, many of them need enabling law to actually take effect.

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