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Comment by joelthelion | Hacker News Reader

If negotiations are completely secret, by the time the deal is ready it's too late to debate on the large orientations of the deal.

Sorry but a large treaty like this cannot be completely negotiated completely behind closed doors. Negotiators need to deal with it.

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One way to solve that would be to have a period in which politicians had to justify their plans, including the kinds of trade deals they would negotiate, to the electorate. Then we could all vote for the politician we preferred. We could call it an "election campaign".

That's the big problem with TTIP: those who negotiated it (on the EU side at least) weren't elected representatives. In fact, elected representatives only very recently received very limited access to the negotiation documents themselves. In Germany, access was granted to members of parliament only January this year. Even so, they weren't even allowed to carry electronic devices or pen-and-paper notebooks.

This is why TTIP, no matter the content, is undemocratic. As is CETA.

Elected representatives could not negotiate the deal themselves because it is way too technical. So the actual negotiators were given a mandate by the elected representatives. Elected representatives then get to decide whether they will vote for the deal. TTIP is dead because it's become clear the deal will not get approval from all representatives, in part because of public disapproval. In conclusion, TTIP _is_ democratic.

If the deal is too technical to negotiate how can the elected representative possibly decide if they should vote for it as they by definition can't understand it?

> Elected representatives could not negotiate the deal themselves because it is way too technical.

It really isn't ...

Could you elaborate?

Fair point, but then surely it is the EU that is undemocratic rather than TTIP.

Sounds nice except that politicians are in no way bound by their electoral promises, and they certainly take liberties with them to get elected, and they can't possibly plan for everything that can come up during their terms.

So instead we will stay with the status quo where large multinationals pit country against country in a race to the bottom. Makes sense.

The orientation of the deal comes from the governments of the memeber states. There is a clear place to fix it and it's in your state if you dislike how it goes so far.

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