Today, Wikileaks released a second batch of the most updated draft texts on the proposed TISA, along with substantive analysis, on each of four massive services sectors: Financial Services, Telecommunications Services, Electronic Commerce, and Maritime Transport. This follows on their release yesterday of cross-cutting annexes on Domestic Regulation, the “Movement of Natural Persons,” Transparency, and Government Procurement, and the Agenda for next week’s negotiations, along with what Wikileaks called the journalistic holy grail: the Core Text of the proposed agreement. The negotiating texts are supposed to remain secret for five years after the deal is finalized or abandoned.
The documents, along with the analysis, highlight the way that the TISA responds to major corporate lobbies’ desire to deregulate services, even beyond the existing World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. This leak exposes the corporate aim to use TISA to further limit the public interest regulatory capacity of democratically elected governments by imposing disciplines on domestic issues from government purchasing and immigration to licensing and certification standards for professionals and business operations, not to mention the regulatory process itself.
The Agenda indicates that other services will likely come under the jurisdiction of the proposed TISA – topics include energy services, environmental services, delivery services, and “patient mobility.”
Given the added dangers of the recently approved Fast Track provisions which would apply to a potential TISA, it is clear that governments should abandon negotiations on this corporate wish list and focus on strengthening public interest regulation and the democratic process.
“The Annex on Domestic Regulation is a serious threat to regulations that people really care about – like what kind of development is allowed in their neighbourhood or the standards for hospital care. Negotiators are using the excuse that these regulations are somehow related to trade in order to create a vast array of restrictions on the right to regulate,” said Ellen Gould, a Canadian – based consultant on trade agreements whose research accompanies the Domestic Regulation Annex. The existence of an annex restricting even non-discriminatory domestic regulations belies the claims by some TISA proponents that the agreement is only about promoting transparency and tackling discriminatory laws.
The existence of a Transparency Annex in a secret trade agreement is itself ironic. The annex shows that corporations are pushing far beyond how a normal person understands “transparency.” The sections on “prior notification of new measures” would mandate that any measure (including laws, regulations, agency rulings, etcetera) must be published in advance, with a “reasonable opportunity” for corporations to comment on them to the governmental entity. But it goes much further; the rationale for the measure must be included, and governments must set up an avenue by which it must respond to the comments. Some countries are even pushing for a mandatory “judicial or administrative review of decisions,” if corporation disagrees with a proposed measure. This Annex, then, proposes a direct pathway for foreign corporate input into the domestic policymaking process of parliamentary and also local elected officials.
The leaked TISA texts reveal the dangers of sweeping, so-called “trade” agreements that are negotiated outside of public scrutiny, providing a cautionary tale for the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership and Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement that are also being negotiated in secret. “As governments around the world implement the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis by re-regulating financial firms to prevent another crisis, the leaked TISA rules could require countries – including the world’s largest financial centers – to halt and even roll back financial regulations. Indeed, TISA would expand deregulatory “trade” rules written under the advisement of large banks before the financial crisis, requiring domestic laws to conform to the now-rejected model of extreme deregulation that led to global recession,” noted Ben Beachy, Research Director at Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and author of the analysis on the leaked Financial Services proposed text.
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