Civil society expresses their view on the trade agreement between EU and US

On March 12, 2014 DG Trade organised a gathering between civil society and the Chief Negotiators of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the trade agreement that is being negotiated between the EU and US.

To be more precise, there were two events: first the Commission gave the possibility to stakeholders to present their views on TTIP and then the Chief Negotiators, Ignacio Garcia Bercero on behalf of the European Commission, and his US counterpart, Dan Mullaney, gave an update on the negotiations and were at the disposal of civil society organisations to answer their questions.

Concerning the stakeholders' event, Social Platform attended the session on "services, investment and public procurement" and for a while the one on "sustainable development, customs and trade facilitation, energy and raw materials, intellectual property, competition and state-owned enterprises, SMEs". What emerged from the first session was that the most controversial issues about TTIP negotiations seem to be the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), the inclusion or not of financial services, and privileged access to the negotiators for industry compared to other stakeholders' interests. ISDS is a legal mechanism allowing an investor from another country to bring a claim against a state in which it has made an investment, because relying on the national courts of the host country to enforce obligations in an investment agreement is not always easy or may even be impossible. Its opponents say it enables foreign companies to challenge public health, environmental and social protection laws that harm their profits.

During the event, stakeholders opposing the ISDS were environmental organisations, consumers' organisations, public interests' advocates (e.g. National Association of Consumer Advocates, Centre nationale de coopération ou developpement, Friends of the Earth, Public Citizens' Global Trade etc.), while Business Europe and other industry representatives stated that ISDS is essential to protecting investors' interests but were open to changing the system that is now in place in many other trade agreements, because they recognise that it has shortcomings. This seems to be at present the position of the Commission too.

Other stakeholders such as CEEP, America's Unions and our member, the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA), stated that public services or social and health services should benefit from a broad exclusion from TTIP, considering that they are not commercial services, but serve the public interest. In the EU these services are of national competence (art. 14 TFEU and Protocol 26 of the Lisbon Treaty). When it comes to their organisation and financing, member states should ensure that they comply with EU laws. It is still not clear what will be the treatment of these services in TTIP.

Negotiations will go on for at least two years, therefore we need to closely monitor their developments.