Why secret?
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.
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.
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.
Really? Only you claim that. Can you post the link please?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Invest...
"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?
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.
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.
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.
Creating opposition takes time and by not allowing that time, the whole process becomes distinctly less democratic.
Thus TPP or TTIP will require (under "Fast Track") a majority vote in both the House and Senate, rather than 2/3 in the Senate alone.
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?
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.
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.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jun/24/gm.food
"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."
Just a little later:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/02/gm.food2
"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."
Anyhow, interesting podcast: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/26/417851577/episo...
Old news. But still glad with every person who comes to this conclusion.
I think we need a law that makes any secret agreement an "unlawful" agreement that we don't have to abide by.