Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

(TTIP)

What is it?

  • A trade and investment agreement being negotiated between the United States and the European Union 
  • Three main areas being negotiated
    • market access
    • specific regulation
    • broader rules and principles and modes of co-operation
  • Essentially creating the biggest free trade area ever by removing tariffs and by uniforming regulation

Background

  •   Post Cold War "Transatlantic Declaration".
    • Continued existence of NATO
    • Biannual meetings between ministers of State, and more frequent encounters between political figures and senior officials.
    • Yearly summits
  • The Transatlantic Business Dialogue
  • The Transatlantic Economic Partnership
  • Transatlantic Economic Council
  • Creation of a group of high-level experts whose conclusions, submitted on February 11, 2013, recommended the launching of negotiations for a wide-ranging free-trade agreement.

Background

  • Negotiations between the United States and the European Union started in July 2013.
  • If successful, the deal would cover more than 40% of global GDP and account for large shares of world trade and foreign direct investment.
  • Brussels and Washington set an ambitious goal of completing negotiations by the end of 2015.
  • Citizens and non-governmental organizations all over Europe are petitioning against TTIP

Procedure

  • Agreement texts are being developed by 24 joint EU-US working groups, each considering a separate aspect of the agreement.
  • Position papers
    • Broad introductions for each side's aims and ambitions for each aspect.  
  •  Textual proposals
    •  More detailed proposals containing an "initial offer." These draft documents can change through the various stages of their development.
  •  Consolidated text
    • ​Working consensus, the result of the negotiations

Market Access

  •  Removing "custom duties on goods and restrictions on services, gaining better access to public markets, and making it easier to invest"
    • liberalization of investment
    • general principles for investment, including strict requirements for expropriation
    • free movement of business managers, and other employees of a corporation, for temporary work purposes
    • liberalization of telecommunication, networks and postal services
    • limits the laws that governments can pass to regulate or publicly run insurance and banking
    • Investor-state dispute settlement
      • ​ allowing corporations to bring actions against governments

Specific Regulation

Broad rules and principles and modes of co-operation

Opposition

  • A self-organised European Citizens' Initiative against TTIP and CETA
    • over 3.2 million signatures within a year
  • Hundrends of demonstrations organized by non-governmental organizations
  • A petition organised by political activism group 38 Degrees, urging Obama to stop negotiating TTIP, signed by over 130,000 people in the UK
  • National objections

 

Concerns

Text

Food and environmental safety

Banking regulations

Privacy

Jobs

Democracy

 

 

 

 

 

ISDS

  • Often included within investment treaties between two states, offers public and private sectors recourse to arbitration with the states which have signed the treaty if they allegedly breach it.

  • Supporters believe such clauses guarantee the terms of treaties, since they offer an independent resolution mechanism for parties who did not sign the treaty.

    • The European Commission even said that ISDS would help to standardize the level of protection for businesses across EU’s member states.

  • Critics state that arbitration conducted in private often results in a settlement between the parties, rather than leading to formal tribunal decisions.

    • arbitrators have a vested interest in pleasing investors, and that investor-state arbitration has a built-in pro-investor bias.

ISDS

 

  • Since arbitrators are effectively “judges for hire” and depend on their appointments for their fees “in a system where only the investors can bring claims, this creates a strong incentive to side with them – as investor-friendly rulings pave the way for more claims, appointments and income in the future,” according to Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), a campaign group.

  • In December 2013, a coalition of over 200 environmentalists, labor unions and consumer advocacy organizations on both sides of the Atlantic sent a letter to the USTR and European Commission demanding the investor-state dispute settlement be dropped from the trade talks, claiming that ISDS was "a one-way street by which corporations can challenge government policies, but neither governments nor individuals are granted any comparable rights to hold corporations accountable".

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