Brussels, 12/11/2013 (Agence Europe) - The spying scandal has increased the uncertainties harboured by consumer rights organisations and environmentalists on the free-trade negotiations.
Despite the Snowden affair and widescale telephone tapping by the NSA in Europe, the EU and US are still going ahead with their negotiations. Following an initial round in mid-July that set the scene for Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations (TTIP), European and US negotiators are meeting in Brussels until 15 November to push on with their talks. Investment, services, energy and raw materials, and also regulatory barriers will be discussed this week and the EU's head negotiator, Ignacio Garcia-Bercero and his US counterpart, Dan Mullaney, will report to the press on Friday on the progress made at the end of this second round of discussions.
Nonetheless, while the negotiators continue with their work, civil society remains on its guard. On Tuesday, two consumer organisations, the BEUC and the TACD, again underlined their concerns about the mixed impact of a transatlantic agreement on consumers. On the one hand, this agreement could benefit consumers by exerting market pressures to improve products and services, lower prices, improve consumer choice and increase cooperation on product and food safety on both sides of the Atlantic but “it should not be done to the detriment of the current regulatory environment on which European consumer trust is based” for their food, medicine, consumer goods and internet sales, say the two organisations in a press release.
Faced with the scandal of the revelations of surveillance and widespread data gathering by the NSA, the two consumer organisations repeat their call for data protection laws to be excluded from the TTIP agenda. BEUC Director General Monique Goyens insisted that “the US espionage scandal has highlighted the extent to which our private lives and personal data protection laws have been violated. This is inadmissible. It is crucial that the EU makes its data protection laws fail-safe. Once this question has been settled, a basis for discussing data transfers to the US might exist. Personal data is not a merchandise and should be kept out of the scope of the negotiations for the agreement”.
Speaking on behalf of the Greens at the European Parliament, Yannick Jadot from France asserted that “the EU has been too passive in its response to the NSA phone tapping scandal”. Rebecca Harms, leader of the Greens group, from Germany, insisted that “the only response to the ongoing surveillance of European citizens and leaders by the US secret services, is an immediate freeze on the free-trade negotiations”. The Greens have called for this issue to be debated during the plenary on 19 October.
Echoing the concerns of the BEUC and many other non-governmental organisations, the Greens also criticised, on Monday, the lack of transparency currently surrounding the transatlantic negotiations. In a press release, French Greens Yannick Jadot and José Bové stated that “the TTIP project is a frontal assault on choices democratically made in Europe, such as our refusal to accept GMOs, hormones in beef or chlorinated poultry meat, our perception of public services, our social, health and environmental provision, as well as our fundamental freedoms. Since the very beginning, we have condemned the decision made by the Commission to keep the contents and modalities secret, which is an attack on these rights”.
Finally, similarly to the BEUC, the Greens are also opposed to the inclusion in the TTIP of a specific legal mechanism for settling disputes between companies and states, whereby companies may claim financial compensation from governments for reducing their prospects of making a profit if they strengthen consumer protection. The BEUC argues that recent cases involving standards on medicine patents and measures for combating smoking must be used as a reminder to the EU not to hand back the reins of power to private courts. (EH/transl.fl)