TTIP Documents Revealed
international.sueddeutsche.de
international.sueddeutsche.de
Apparently, the few selected MoP in Germany who were given access to the drafts had a few hours to look at a 1000+ pages, in English legalese, with a dictionary but no internet access.
Apparently, the drafts were full of certain spelling errors. The assumption was that they were personalized and injected on purpose such that photographs could be traced back to the origin.
Source - German media coverage.
My support for most post-globalisation trade liberalisation treaties tends to be lukewarm. However, this can't really be called "not much". 400,000 jobs against a working population of ~300M is a decrease in unemployment by .13 percentage points. 0.5% increase in GDP is still ~70B that otherwise wouldn't be there.
Besides, you can't decontextualize the gains from the losses, both economical and cultural.
I can imagine for example, in worst case scenario, billions transferred from EU to tax havens because of the ISDS, and job losses because of [partial] loss of protection of Geographical indications.
[1]=https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140417/09391926947/tafta...
But if only selected MPs can see the text at all, maybe they've been selected carefully.
It's more a corporations against the people thing. The problem those treaties solve is that they lock future legislative changes at the national level.
After signing it, how are you going to change it? It will be very hard and we will accept it because it's like "things work in the real world".
Good for the EU. If only our government showed the same care for its own citizens.
Sounds like a reasonable argument.
These kinds of lawsuits don't exist in Europe, in the worst case a company will pay $10,000 to a single person. But there are other protections in place and if you take those away you will end up with much worse protection than the US has because this indirect regulation doesn't exist.
Yes, they'll release a product that might be harmful. The tradeoff is whether they can get away with it in court. The Ford Pinto case is a classic example of that kind of thinking gone wrong. I suggest you look its details up to see how our boardrooms think on things. It was really bad. Least they paid for it.
This is purely in theory, in particular for some industries and products.
C8 made lots of $$$ to DuPont, and it took 50+ years to be banned.
You can't prove, in a strict sense, that C8 caused harm to any given person. Also, you don't know that a product like C8 is harmful when you release it.
A company will release a harmful product very gladly, as long as it has a pool large enough of scientists, lawyers and PR professionals to keep the ball rolling for a long [enough] time.
> "whereas the U.S. only bans them if people have already been harmed as a result of consuming said products"
I think those people harmed would disagree.
Also to "scientifically prove" something might not be as easy as it sounds. You may have a couple of studies that find a harmful effect, and then you have some (possibly industry-backed) studies that find no effect at all. You now have a strong hint, but no proof. At best it is "scientifically debated". Think of tobacco industry vs "smoking causes cancer", or oil companies vs "global warming is caused by humans".
The main arguments against GMO essentially boil down to that they may be harmful in ways we can't yet test for. Even if we had enumerated all the ways in which things could be harmful, we wouldn't know our list was complete. You might as well ban food that hasn't been scientifically proven not to harm invisible garden gnomes.
So the real question is: should something only be banned when it's 99.5% certain that it's harmful? Is 50% chance of it being harmful okay? Or 80%? And why?
The EU prefers to err on the side of safety. The US prefers to err on the side of profit. I don't see why the US approach would be better.
The burden of proof shouldn't be on the government, it should be on the manufacturer, similar to how medicines require FDA approval.
The very reason we're creating GMOs for food is to reduce the resources (land, energy, fertilizers, water, etc.) needed for food production. The motivation of course is that lower resource usage means lower production costs.
Requiring unreasonable burdens of proof mean greater waste in our food production, but that side of things isn't a scary and therefore gets less consideration than the limitless possibilities of unknown harms that could come from GMOs.
There's some drop in the price of a hamburger below which I'm not willing to risk a Leprechaun extinction. However, I'm willing to risk extinction of Leprechauns, Yetis, and Loch Ness "monsters" in exchange for less land needed to grow my food, and fewer children being under-nourished. These are real problems that GMOs can help with.
Imagine the hysteria if a GMO food item would have been involved in the chain of events!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_o...
If you're from one of non-blessed EU countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Romania and most notably Poland), you can not enter the US without a visa, even for tourism.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/20...
At least put some effort into naming. To have your rights grind away so slowly and being coerced like a mule to even thread that mill that maims you.. Im for a law that forbids to discuss content-similar contracts that have been downvoted for at least 8 years.
On average, the EU is more transparent than the EU, and politicians tend to feel more like they really should be representing the people, but it's really a sliding scale with the US just a bit further down than the EU.
I really hope transparency about the TTIP negotiations will help turn this around in both the EU and the US.
I don't know much about that kind of negotiations, the secrecy might as well be the right strategy to push it through I guess?
".. it also contains an ‘investor protection’ provision allowing corporations to effectively sue governments for taking action to harm their business."
(source: http://www.publicfinanceinternational.org/news/2016/02/ttip-...)
So .. effectively, this could mean that a corporation could overrule a government in legislation if it would be harming it's profits.
The big problem with this for example here in Finland is that through these measure big corporations could try to take over the nations natural resources, like water and forest, which are and should be protected by local laws. But through this kind of legal means, these corporations could be allowed to sue the government over the loss of a profit due to protecting legislation, in order just to make a profit out of it. Which is complete and total bullshit.
http://theconversation.com/big-tobacco-vs-australia-philip-m...
Yes, it's a virtual threat.
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/18/austra...
ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) is a sane concept. The implementation might have problems (for example closed courtroom "trials"), but it's not about protecting profits. It's about protecting equality and fairness for all before the law, and in case of States, holding them accountable to make fair and egalitarian laws.
What's the typical example? A random Company invests in a country, sets up a nice subsidiary starts doing business, everything is legal. But the country (the State) sees that it's taking up the market, uh-oh,
a) better make a law against whatever they are doing, or b) better make a law against (that specific or all) foreign companies doing whatever.
Which one(s) is (are) problematic?
Also, the other thing, fairness, comes in when a State wants to buy out a company but doesn't want to pay market price. Basically eminent domain without unfair compensation.
The same goes for ending tax breaks (or other investment incentives) sooner than promised. Because that's a breach of agreement.
Your link (publicfinanceinternational.org) refers an article from globaljustice.co.uk which has a list of problematic ISDS arbitration cases, that's the real data, anything else is just fluff. ( http://www.globaljustice.org.uk/sites/default/files/files/re... )
Let's look at the big bully US agribusiness vs Mexico (the rules of arbitration are set by NAFTA).
http://www.state.gov/s/l/c42198.htm
http://www.italaw.com/sites/default/files/case-documents/ita... the concrete "award" (findings of the tribunal).
It turns out that these tribunals are looking at laws and apply them. Like courts. And they are much likely more objective than any court in either host country. And then that award was reviewed by the courts of a place chosen by the parties (the Ontario court system).
Seems quite like due process to me.
I'm not saying all of the cases are jolly good and there was absolutely no problematic awards, but just looking at the Vodafone vs India one, the "retrospective capital gains tax" hits us and makes you wonder, what the fuck were the Indians thinking, first rule of how to legislate. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_certainty )
But enough on ISDS. There are big problems with TTIP, but not this one.
when this has been done and when it has happened not in the interest of public well being? on the other hand here is an example of what some corporations actually do in the present https://youtu.be/6UsHHOCH4q8?t=6m54s
http://theconversation.com/big-tobacco-vs-australia-philip-m...
The Uruguay v Philip Morris is the same, they claim that they have a right to use their trademark on packages. Might be true, the tribunal will find out. Still Uruguay can still ban tobacco altogether.
This is the equivalent of a frivolous lawsuit. It's part of the system, and it's okay. It gives transparency to the whole big companies (investors) and even bigger organizations (states) interactions, and tries to keep things equal and fair, all in all objective and unbiased.
Eventually Philip Morris will lose. (Though there might not be a loser-pays scheme in force for this case, but in general it's up to the treaty to establish the rules of arbitration, plus usually the tribunal itself has such powers, but in the future more and more cases will follow the UNCITRAL model, which do require the loser to pay for the costs of litigation.
https://books.google.com/books?id=h1H8Er1Y8X8C&pg=PA108&lpg=...
)
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/nov/10/tpps-clauses...
After all, the scope definition clause was a futile attempt from the beginning, since any law can be dressed up as environmental or "deemed appropriate" by the State. I don't really trust lawmakers on this, (nor corporations not to abuse these treaties as yet another venue to argue their bullshit or righteous grievance), let's a 3rd party decide this.
Because in case of Germany vs Vattenfall, when Germany was phasing out nuclear power, they should have calculated with the costs of this. You apply for a very costly permit, and boom, that sector has just been banned by the State, because irrational fear.
The same goes for the MFN (most favorable nation) clause. A state shouldn't pick and choose how it treats foreign companies as long as they act according to its laws, so it should place the same economic incentives and burdens on them.
Strange, for Mr Kahale or for the Guardian to not mention in November that the Award was Annuled in October in the Occidental vs Ecuador case.
Again, the concept is sane. Why require a fixed courtroom, when the important point is objectivity, and that parties select judges they trust who then in turn select the chair of the tribunal, so someone both parties' experts trust.
They usually do rely on (that is cite in similar cases, and usually similar cases reach similar outcomes) precedent, but since this is not a "common law" but a "civil law" (codified law) system, precedents are not binding. And there is a process for appeal, as seen in the Ecuador case. And yes, judges judge based on their opinion (interpretation) of the law. News at 11 :|
> The arbitrators can also be severely conflicted, says Kahale, because they may act as a judge one day and as a lawyer for a party the next.
Then don't pick them as your selected champion/judge. Duh. That's how Kahale is making his money, he runs a law firm representing countires. So they are usually on the States' side, maybe even sometimes lending a lawyer as a judge for a country.
> .. nor are they required to act like courts
Umm, they do? The treaty specifies the details, but most arbitration providers have very specific rules of procedure, just like courts.
tl;dr arbitration tribunals ain't saints, but they seem much more sane, egalitarian and fair, than a host country's high court (which are usually ideologically biased either traditionally or after the current regime stuffs it full of its trustees)
Sorry, I don't follow. He's an expert lawyer in the field, his firm often represents governments in these actions, and he's saying that the wording doesn't protect those governments as much as they think it does and providing a very simple and clear reason for his position. Whether or not he might be biased in a courtroom or tribunal does not affect the validity of his argument about the wording.
You apply for a very costly permit, and boom, that sector has just been banned by the State, because irrational fear.
Well, that "irrational fear" followed the incident at Fukushima. That was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, and although it's too early to know the true cost in human life, most estimates expect several thousand people to die early because of evacuation conditions, cancers caused by radiation exposure, and so on. Evidently some level of concern about the safety of nuclear reactors is justified.
The question is where to draw the line. If in fact the Vattenfall reactors in Germany were not vulnerable to any similar problems and they really were closed down suddenly despite posing no risk, it seems fair that they should receive some reasonable level of compensation. On the other hand, in a case like the cigarette firms we talked about before, imposing laws that benefit human health at the expense of the business because what the business does is inherently harmful and they know it, I have little sympathy if the business loses out even if it was a direct result of the government's actions.
One could reasonably debate the forum in which such determinations might be made. However, the idea that an entire case with potentially billions of pounds of taxpayers' money hanging in the balance could sensibly be decided by just three people, behind closed doors, without any means of appeal, seems absurd to me.
tl;dr arbitration tribunals ain't saints, but they seem much more sane, egalitarian and fair, than a host country's high court (which are usually ideologically biased either traditionally or after the current regime stuffs it full of its trustees)
I see little evidence of that here in the UK. The British government can and does lose big court cases all the time, and our judiciary is fiercely defensive of its independence from the government of the day. If a foreign investor isn't willing to trust the legal system of a host nation to act reasonably, perhaps they should be investing elsewhere anyway, because there are plenty of other ways to lose huge amounts of money in that case without any hostility from the host government itself.
More people die because of coal/oil/gas power plants than because of nuclear ones. So now, instead of inspecting their own plants, which they have the best position to do so, they're relying on who knows what form of power generation.
It's understandable that you feel that by submitting the UK to an unknown even higher court you take a risk, but a lot of people on the other hand feel that it's going to be a boon to restrict the actions (and especially future actions) of their State. And the documents are public (and there is a push to make video recordings and even live streaming of the discussions/arguments), and in English, much better than when a company has to deal with let's say the Hungarian courts.
And exactly, because a lot of investment is not making its way to such countries, why the whole treaty is negotiated.
The European Commission conducted possibly the largest public consultation in history and found almost unanimous opposition either to ISDS or to TTIP in its entirety, except among some organisations representing businesses, and even there the response was mixed. So who are the "alot of people" you're talking about here? They don't appear to be ordinary EU citizens, nor lawyers, trade unions, academics...
http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2015/january/tradoc_15...
http://www.globaljustice.org.uk/news/2015/jan/13/new-levels-...
There are millions of people in the EU currently quite grateful for the fact that their country is dependent on the EU, so their government can't dismantle their democracy at light-speed. Look at the situation with the populist right-wing governments in Poland and Hungary.
Why not canceling this whole concept of democracy.
Why is regulation a bad thing? These rules exist for a reason in health/food for example.
The recent changes to VAT feel like a mess. Maybe I'm missing something there and they're not as bad as they seem?
For a start, it is effectively impossible for any business to fully comply with the rules now, unless it literally has the resources to understand detailed tax rules in every EU member state.
Even a good faith effort to comply with the spirit of the new rules and file the necessary returns will be beyond many micro-businesses. As a direct consequence, it appears that many people's side-businesses have ceased trading altogether, which of course is a loss to those businesses, their customers and the tax revenues of the affected states. The relevant authorities failed to even recognise that many thousands of such businesses existed at all, or to consult with them or take their situation into account in any way when writing the rules. In some cases, senior government figures even expressed surprise, when awareness was finally raised among the small business community literally just a few days before the new rules kicked in, that no-one had spoken up sooner in the multi-year process of writing the rules (that none of the affected people had any reason to know about).
Perhaps the biggest kick in the teeth of all is that for most small businesses that were large enough that it was worth continuing, the easiest way to comply was to outsource the various handling to specialist services. Given that the claimed purpose of these rules was to make it harder for large international businesses with lots of accountants to reduce their tax payments, would you like to guess what types of business were best placed to offer those new specialised services to the small, local businesses who got screwed by the new rules and thus profit off the creation of those rules at the expense of the small businesses?
Or, to prevent foreign online retailers from undercutting local ones simply through lower "local" taxation rates.
As far as I know the VAT law applies only to service providers (like Skype, and AWS) and you can easily file taxes through the mini one-shop-stop way ( http://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/tax/articles/eu-201... - chose an EU Member State, I recommend Ireland, their online thingie seems to be okay ).
As someone running small businesses that do have to deal with EU tax rules in some cases, it is hard to imagine how they could have got this one more wrong. I know several people who run other relatively small businesses (though in some cases much larger than any of mine) who after also going through the hassle of modifying all of their systems to comply as well as possible have the same conclusion as me. For all of us, the most commercially reasonable option if we had known the full cost of compliance would have been to instead simply decline to take on any EU customers outside our home nations from the date the new rules came into effect and have nothing to do with the rest of the EU or its VAT rules at all.
I never claimed there is a minimum amount, I just said that not anything over the net is automatically subject to the new "customer's host state's VAT applies" rule.
> conflicts between the rules about VAT and other EU consumer protection rules about advertising all-inclusive prices
You can't advertise as "9.99EUR + VAT"? Or guess the VAT rate based on geo-IP location association?
What kind of services do you provide?
I agree that it's still a far cry from a great solution. First of all they have too many damned useless documents and no code at all. (At least I haven't found any.) Nor a proper infographics, or a diagram illustrating the flow.
No, you said only service providers, citing two of the biggest firms in tech.
Unfortunately, the rule is far more general than that. Anyone selling any sort of digital services or products online is covered, even if it's just someone selling crosswords from their kitchen table that are then supplied in electronic form.
You can't advertise as "9.99EUR + VAT"?
Technically, probably not. For B2C sales, prices are typically supposed to be shown VAT-inclusive according to the various consumer protection rules. Naturally that is difficult if you don't yet know what the applicable VAT rate is.
Or guess the VAT rate based on geo-IP location association?
You can guess, but that infamously is not a sufficient standard of proof of customer's location for the required record keeping, so you might have to change your mind later. For the reasons above, that can cause compliance issues of its own.
There are other problems with relying on IP-based geolocation as well. For example, some EU member states have regional variations in the applicable VAT rates for the same products or services. To the best of my knowledge, no IP-based system yet exists that has sufficient accuracy to cope with that. In fact, even within the regions they do cover, most such systems are expected to give the wrong answer perhaps 10% of the time because proxies, VPNs, errors in the underlying IP-to-location database, and so on.
There are plenty of other problems with the new VAT system as well. We haven't even talked about being accountable to and subject to audit by the tax authorities in every member state, or the number of such states that have already sent out mass demands for incorrect tax revenues under threat of immediate legal action if they aren't paid, in some cases even demanding payment faster than the receiving small business could reasonably take legal advice to make sure it wasn't their mistake.
The whole VAT mess is just a giant screw-up, a set of rules designed after long and expensive debates, perhaps conceived with noble intentions, but ultimately implemented with horrific incompetence. Unfortunately, the same could be said of various other recent EU rules affecting small businesses, consumer protections, and related areas as well.
For example online tangible product sales is not covered, as it's not a service. (If I understand the explanatory notes correctly.) But selling software is covered, because you can electronically deliver it. Bah.
Yes, the crossword or sudoku provider has to fiddle with VAT, just as an app store. But if the crosswords are made by humans, then it's not an electronic service. The necessity of the human element seems to be the deciding factor.
Furthermore, the point is that this is a step in the right direction, a unified legal requirement, because before this providers were simply ignoring the VAT, and Member States' tax authorities were not really enforcing it.
Regarding the inclusiveness. This is a problem of legal harmonization, eventually one law/statue/directive will come out on top.
So, I'd just go with the IP based approach, the important thing is good faith. Not a 100% correct solution. And you can always display a warning next to the price that you are not sure of the taxes to apply, so please dear end-user select where you are established.
And yes, national (member state) tax offices act rather dumb and macho when it comes to collecting money.
This isn't really a unified legal requirement where before we got to ignore VAT. In reality, it's quite the opposite. We now have to comply with 28 different sets of legal requirements, where before we only had to charge VAT at our local rate and account for it on our local VAT return. For very small businesses here in the UK, such as someone selling the kitchen table crossword supplies I mentioned as an example before, we weren't required to charge VAT or file returns at all below a certain threshold on a de minimis principle, and no such threshold exists under the new rules.
So, I know the problems, I'm aware of the clusterfuck, but it's simply exactly as bad from our point of view as it was before (and at least there is an option to file VAT for the whole EU, which was non existent before, even if implementing it is a pain in the ass).
I don't know why you did not have to - in a legal sense - care about the location of the customer before. Selling something to an EU citizen in a state different from the state your business is established in meant that you were doing business in that state, hence you were supposed to register at their tax office and file and pay VAT on behalf of your customers. Just nobody did, because fuck that.
Anyhow, it's going to be years before it's sorted out. (The "action plan" is to be presented at the end of 2017, http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/action_pla... )
Also, there still seems to be an exemption for small businesses in a lot of member states ( http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/resources/documents/tax... )
That was never the case, at least not for any business I've been part of. We've always had to charge VAT to EU customers, whether in our home nation or any other member state, but it was charged at our home nation's rate previously and was counted on our normal VAT return. If you think that policy was incorrect and we should have been registering with every relevant EU member state individually, all I can tell you is that two different accountancy firms, independent tax helplines we had access to, and guidance directly from our national tax authority all seemed to disagree with you at various points prior to the recent changes.
For the avoidance of doubt, I'm only talking about the B2C sales here. B2B has always worked differently, and there are separate mechanisms for reporting cross-border B2B sales within the EU and dealing with the associated VAT.
Also for the avoidance of doubt, we're in the EU (the UK, specifically). The rules for businesses based in EU member states are somewhat different to the rules for those outside.
Flat taxes might not be practical, but the baffling system of VAT and excise duties we have in place at the moment place a really high bureaucratic burden on businesses.
I'm often pro-regulation, and I like taxes, and I definitely thought some of those tax avoiding businesses were abusively avoiding tax.
We usually call it consumer protection here and most of EU citizens like the way it is.