Anti Gats Irish Groups / Parties please sign up to this open letter to Pascal Lamy

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday November 21, 2002 16:48 by Article 133 Information Group

Please distribute widely and get Irish Groups to sign. 133 has not gone away. It is operational now.

http://www.gatswatch.org/article.php3?id_article=2 Original Letter at the above Gatswatch Address

Monday 18 November 2002

In this open letter, addressed to EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, over 60 European civil society organisations reiterate their call to publish immediately the full GATS requests that the European Union has submitted and the incoming requests made to the EU by other WTO members; to conduct an economic, social and environmental assessment of the past and proposed service liberalisation before undertaking further GATS commitments; and finally, to exclude public services from the GATS negotiations.

Organisations can sign on to this letter till 1 December 2002.

Please send an e-mail message, including organisation name, web site and contact e-mail address to: .

Print version (pdf)

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Dear Commissioner Lamy,

Thank you for your reply to our previous open letter regarding the EU's approach to the WTO services negotiations. We would like to take this opportunity to respond to your reply, as published on the DG Trade website.

In our open letter we requested that the European Commission and the EU Member States exercised full transparency and democracy in their decision-making regarding the European Union's GATS requests to other WTO member states and the requests subsequently received by the EU. In particular, we requested that you make the EU draft request lists public on 31 May, at the latest, to allow for an open public debate and to enable effective control of the decision-making process by the European Parliament and EU Member State parliaments.

We welcome your statement about the importance of transparent processes and involvement of all stakeholders with regard to WTO negotiations. We are, however, thoroughly disappointed by the European Union's handling of the GATS negotiations so far, especially the non-transparent process of drafting the EU GATS requests this spring. We further regret the EU's refusal to make public the official documentation of outgoing EU's GATS requests, agreed to by the Member States in June and submitted to other WTO Members on 4 July 2002. Finally, we regret that, since early July, the Commission has provided insufficient information concerning the progress of the GATS negotiations. For example, the Commission has provided no information at all on bilateral talks in the past months, whereas the EC GATS Consultation Document released on 12 November comes very late in the process of preparing the EU offer and gives an incomplete and too generalised summary of the incoming requests.

In short, we reiterate our call; to publish immediately the full GATS requests that the European Union has submitted and the incoming requests made to the EU by other WTO members; to conduct an economic, social and environmental assessment of the past and proposed service liberalisation before undertaking further GATS commitments; and finally, to exclude public services from the GATS negotiations.

More specifically:

Lack of democracy and transparency

Submission of initial EU requests

In our letter of 7th May, we asked for the EU requests to be made public before 1 June (thus in advance of the June 30 deadline) to allow for proper scrutiny and feedback from parliaments and EU Member State governments. This did not occur, moreover, the requests were rushed through Committee 133 in a hasty and non-transparent manner. Most parliaments had no opportunity to examine the draft request lists, and in the rare cases that they did, were held to strict rules of confidentiality and even then, were only granted access a few days before the requests were to be submitted to the addressees. This process is rendered even more objectionable when one learns - as we have now in fact learnt - that the given date, June 30, for submitting initial requests was not in fact a hard and fast deadline.

Indeed, the Statement from the Chairman of the Special Session of the Council for Trade in Services, to the Trade Negotiations Committee (6th June 2002) declared with regards to «the date of 30 June 2002 referred to the submission of initial requests... those [requests] submitted thereafter would not be considered untimely.»

As the Commission's requests have been delivered to 109 recipients, we consider that the summary published on the DG Trade website is insufficient for allowing a substantial public debate on the trade liberalisation measures that the EU is asking from 109 other WTO members. This summary makes no mention, for example, of the numerous regulations that the EU is requesting other WTO members to remove as part of the current negotiations. In most cases, these are in fact restrictions that WTO member states have placed on their sector commitments in the existing GATS agreement; such restrictions are often considered critical development tools. Furthermore, the summary does not even indicate which countries are being targeted by the initial proposals.

In your letter, you appeal to «a tradition of confidentiality» which supposedly justifies the absence of transparency and the scant summary on the DG Trade website as the only information the public and their elected representatives need. Tradition is not, nor can it be, an argument in itself. Your so-called «tradition» of confidentiality - i.e. deliberately hiding from the public, in both the north and the south, vital information that will seriously affect their futures - is precisely the «tradition» which is fuelling growing opposition to the WTO. Furthermore, there is little chance that this confidentiality will encourage WTO Member States to take «requests back to their own stakeholders for review». Why should we subscribe to such a statement when the Commission itself has taken no requests back to its own stakeholders and clearly has no intention of ever doing so? In simple language, this argument is hypocritical.

We fear also that given the tight time frame agreed at the Doha Ministerial, other WTO Members will have little time to adequately consult and process the EU's list of requests.

In conclusion, we hereby reiterate our demand for the immediate publication, on the DG Trade website, of the full GATS requests that the European Union has submitted and of all the requests it has received from other WTO members.

Unequal treatment of different stakeholders

Although we recognise the efforts of the Commission to discuss the EU's external trade policies with civil society on a regular basis, those of us who have attended these meeting find that they are briefings rather than genuine dialogue. We believe that the Commission should acknowledge that if such «consultations» had been satisfactory in the past, criticism of the EU's negotiating approach and GATS proposals would not be necessary today. You also note in your reply, «my services have also on a number of occasions organised internet chats where I respond to questions from members of the general public.» Surely no reasonable person would consider such «chats» as a substitute for a mechanism through which negotiating priorities could be solicited from civil society organisations.

In contrast to these ad hoc and unsatisfactory «consultations» with civil society, as early as 1999, the Commission has co-operated closely with the European Services Forum (ESF). We have ample evidence for the European Services Forum's privileged access to the European Union GATS negotiators. You may recall the statement made by DG Trade official Mr. Robert Madelin at a UK business conference in September 1999: «We are going to rely heavily on that Network [i.e. the European Services Forum]. [...] We are going to rely on it just as heavily as on member state direct advice in trying to formulate our objectives.»

The recent DG Trade letter, addressed to Mr. Pascal Kerneis of the ESF, provides clear evidence of this close co-operation between DG Trade and the ESF. In this letter, DG Trade specifically solicited industry input to a detailed EU list of trade barriers in the distribution sector, to be used for the distribution paragraph in the EU GATS requests. The last paragraph of the letter stresses «the importance to provide within the following days any input you may have, as we are currently finalising the draft requests that will be transmitted to Member States very soon.»

When you state in your letter that the Commission has attempted «to ensure a balanced input into the EC's preparations for the GATS negotiations», but that only «few substantive contributions have been received from NGOs», this does not reflect reality. We would like to remind you that the Commission has never approached citizens' organisations in a similarly targeted manner nor asked them for detailed input in the formulation of EU GATS requests.

Preparing the initial EU GATS Offer

In our open letter of 7 May we asked for similar transparency in the preparation of the EC GATS offers. The EC GATS Consultation Document, released on 12 November, seems to respond to this request, but in fact falls short of the level of transparency that is necessary for a well-informed public debate and democratic oversight of the EU's current GATS agenda.

Therefore, we repeat: a first step to ensure transparency of process and true stakeholder involvement would mean publishing the full text of incoming requests made to the EU by other WTO members and the draft offers prepared by the Commission in reply to these requests.

EU Sustainability Impact Assessment of Services

In response to our demand for a for full evaluation and impact assessment of services liberalisation and the GATS, you point to the Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) of the proposed new round of trade negotiations (including services), which is currently underway. However:

The EU's SIA will not assess the impacts of the existing GATS rules on the ability of governments to effectively regulate services, promote public service provision and promote the development of domestic service suppliers in the developing world.

The EU's SIA will not assess the potential impacts on «policy space» of proposed new «general obligations» on, for example, domestic regulation, government procurement and subsidies.

The EU's SIA - if it uses case studies of past services liberalisation - may give an indication of some of the impacts of such liberalisation. However, this information will not be used to define the EU's position. The EU's SIA takes the current negotiating positions as a given. We therefore conclude that the EU will not itself consider whether or not to liberalise. It will only consider possible «flanking measures» that might accompany liberalisation to circumvent adverse impacts. Furthermore, the SIA can have no real impact on EU GATS negotiating positions, as the first sectoral reports on services are announced for 17 March 2003, shortly before the 31 March 2003 deadline for GATS offers.

For these reasons, we are calling for an assessment of past services liberalisation in order to stimulate debate on the benefits and disadvantages of liberalisation. We also call for economic, social and environmental assessment of the impacts on current and proposed GATS rules on effective government regulation before proceeding with further GATS commitments. Debate on appropriate rules for trade in services is also required.

List of signatories

GATSwatch is a joint project of Corporate Europe Observatory and Transnational Institute
Paulus Potterstraat 20, 1071 DA Amsterdam, The Netherlands