Red Pepper » Trade

Anti-capitalism: alive and well

admin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:50:32 +0000

On 30 November 1999, around 100,000 trade unionists, environmentalists and anti-capitalist activists marched in protest against the first World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial conference in the US. As police attacked protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, US president Bill Clinton threatened to abandon the WTO summit altogether. The mayor of Seattle declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard.

The WTO had come into being just four years earlier, as the final act of the Uruguay Round of world trade negotiations. Its ambitions were clear from the outset. Former WTO director-general Renato Ruggiero spoke of the organisation’s mission as ‘writing the constitution of a single global economy’. Protesters knew that the Seattle demonstrations were more than just a coming together of individual struggles for environmental justice or workers’ rights. Seattle was an act of mass resistance to corporate globalisation itself.

Yet Seattle was more than just a spectacle of resistance. It was also a famous victory. The demonstrations succeeded in derailing the launch of a new round of trade negotiations designed to force open world markets for the benefit of transnational capital. Under pressure from demonstrators outside, and from furious African and Caribbean delegates within, the WTO talks collapsed in failure. The global justice movement had come of age.

Victories

Ten years on from Seattle, the movement can boast further victories. The WTO was eventually able to launch its new Doha Round of trade talks in 2001, amidst explicit threats to developing countries following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Yet those talks collapsed again just two years later at the WTO’s Cancún ministerial conference, as a result of intensive collaboration between global justice activists of North and South.

Better still, the WTO was forced to completely abandon its planned expansion into new issue areas such as foreign investment and government procurement, which would have subordinated even more sectors of our economies to the organisation’s global constitution.

The WTO has lurched from crisis to crisis ever since, with further collapses leading to long-term stagnation. Current attempts to revive the trade talks smack of desperation, while the alternative of abandoning them altogether would be a grave admission of failure. Yet many countries have already voted with their feet by turning to bilateral or regional trade negotiations in place of the multilateral WTO. The EU’s aggressive Global Europe strategy, launched in 2006, seeks to force through on a bilateral basis many of the same measures that were already rejected by developing countries in the multilateral talks.

The US has adopted a similar strategy, and its regional free trade initiatives have met with strong resistance. Coordinated opposition put an end to the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, which topped the Bush administration’s agenda at the start of the decade but was dead in the water by 2005.In its place, new economic initiatives in Latin America are now openly challenging the supremacy of the neoliberal Washington consensus. These include the Banco del Sur as a genuine development bank for the region, and the Bolivarian Alternative (ALBA) to replace the free trade agenda promoted by the US.

Global and diverse

So where is the global justice movement, now that capitalism’s latest crisis is upon us? While struggles still continue in all corners of the globe, the movement seems to have been marginalised in the debate over the future of the world economy. Does this mean it has served its purpose? Is the global justice movement dead?

The movement has certainly not disappeared. It has, however, lost the high profile it enjoyed ten years ago as the mainstream media has turned its attention to the ‘war on terror’ as its primary focus in international affairs. Demonstrations against the World Bank and IMF in Prague (2000) and against the G8 in Genoa (2001) were widely covered, but since 9/11 anti-globalisation protests have become yesterday’s news. Ongoing resistance in Latin America, Africa and Asia has received even less attention: how much coverage was given to this September’s demonstrations in New Delhi, when 50,000 farmers were arrested en masse as Indian social movements mobilised against the WTO?

Partly, too, the global justice movement has developed more targeted, less spectacular campaigns against the neoliberal agenda. Trade union federations from 11 major developing countries have joined forces to fight off WTO proposals on industrial trade that would wipe out their manufacturing sectors with massive loss of jobs. The international peasant movement La Via Campesina has sustained an intense campaign to remove agriculture from the WTO altogether, in view of the organisation’s devastating impact on farmers across the world. These and many other initiatives at the national level are further coordinated through the Our World is Not for Sale network, and have continued to frustrate the WTO’s ambitions long after the more spectacular protests have ended.

Far from disappearing, the global justice movement has broadened into a truly diverse movement. Trade unionists from North and South have joined with environmentalists, farmers’ groups, fishing communities, indigenous peoples, youth and other social movements against the common threat of corporate globalisation.

The thousands who took over the streets of Hong Kong in protest against the WTO’s 2005 conference were led by migrant workers and women’s rights groups from across Asia, protesting against the commodification of their labour under world trade rules. Such mobilisations are a tribute to the ceaseless organising and political education undertaken in favelas, villages, colleges and workplaces the world over. These actions form the basis of the global justice movement, and they remain as strong as ever.

This broadening and deepening of the movement has been facilitated by the development of social forums over the past decade. Since 2001, the World Social Forum and its regional offshoots have provided crucial spaces for many hundreds of thousands of activists to build networks for coordinated resistance. At the regional level, too, spaces such as the European Social Forum have facilitated the construction of networks linking up movements across countries and across themes. This painstaking activity takes place away from the gaze of the mainstream media, but is crucial for the movement’s long-term sustainability and growth.

Political power

Of course it would be wrong to suggest that we can rest on our laurels, as the global justice movement clearly faces new challenges today. While individual struggles have seen huge victories, the movement has failed to set the terms of the debate on the sort of new economic order we wish to come out of the current crisis. Despite the evident bankruptcy of global capitalism, world leaders have done their best to ignore calls for more radical change. Turning our individual struggles into political power at the global level remains elusive.

While the WTO has been unable to conclude the Doha Round of international trade negotiations, we have not been able to kill them off altogether. G20 leaders have now called for a conclusion to the talks in 2010, despite the acknowledged damage that this will cause poorer countries. This was precisely the result of the previous Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, which led to huge losses for the world’s least developed countries, and especially those of sub-Saharan Africa. It is also why the Doha Round was originally billed as a ‘development round’, with the supposed aim of undoing some of the harm caused by earlier agreements.

A genuine development round of trade talks would have removed the threats to public services and industrial policy that came in as a result of the Uruguay Round. It would also have ended the vast subsidies handed out to European and US agribusiness, which lead to the dumping of cheap produce on overseas markets and the destruction of millions of livelihoods in farming communities around the world. Yet the WTO quickly dismissed any hopes that it might deliver such a positive agenda. Instead, the organisation reverted to type with a new wave of trade liberalisation designed to force open agricultural, industrial and services markets for the benefit of multinational corporations alone.

The past ten years have confirmed that the WTO will never deliver a positive agenda for change. Suggestions that it can be reformed to meet the needs of a new world order fail to appreciate the deep-seated ideology and vested interests that drive the organisation. The Doha Round was its opportunity to prove that it could act in the interests of development and social justice, and it has failed dismally. Ultimately, as the Seattle protestors recognised, there can be no progressive future with the WTO.

This radical vision of a world without the WTO is the agenda that must inspire today’s global justice movement. We have spent enough time on individual campaigns around the specific parts of the globalisation agenda, neglecting the broader political analysis and imperative for change. Seattle offered a glimpse of the power that the movement can wield if it joins its disparate parts in a broad front against the common enemy. Ten years on, the movement is stronger and better connected than ever. It is time to take it to the next level.

John Hilary is executive director of War on Want

Derailing the WTO

admin — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 19:39:00 +0000

These demands include:

drastic democratic reform of the WTO;

no expansion of negotiations into “New Issues” (see “Free trade on a knife edge“)

immediate removal of public services from the General Agreement on Trade in Services (Gats), and full disclosure of Gats offers and requests made so far;

an end to First World dumping of subsidised exports on developing country markets; and

greater rights for governments to regulate their economies in line with labour, social and environmental standards.

Such consensus would have been unthinkable a few years ago. International trade unions publicly feuded with Southern civil-society groups over how to challenge the WTO. The ICFTU believed that by simply changing the rules managing trade, globalisation could be given a “human face”. Hence its longstanding campaign, backed by US and EU governments, for a “workers’ rights clause”, which would make membership of the WTO conditional on respect for “core labour standards”.

That campaign was opposed outright by most developing countries. They accused the North of a protectionist conspiracy to destroy their only competitive advantage – cheap labour. Southern NGOs supported universal workers” rights but opposed making them a condition of trade liberalisation. They wanted to halt free trade and curtail the WTO’s power altogether – not give it control over yet more issues.

The issue rapidly turned into a surreal dispute over who had the greater legitimacy to talk on behalf of the world’s workers. The ICFTU, formally representing over 100 million workers (almost none of whom knew that it existed), or unelected, unaccountable NGO “think-tanks” of middle-class intellectuals?

Since Seattle relations between unions and other NGOs have improved after determined efforts by both sides to overcome differences and draw up a common agenda on which they can work together. Encouraged by more progressive global unions like Public Services International, the unions have shifted their position some way towards groups like the World Development Movement, the southern African Alternative Information and Development Centre and the Third World Network. For example, the unions have toughened their line on Gats, now oppose negotiations on New Issues and have quietly dropped the workers” rights clause as their priority.

With the present WTO system on a knife edge, civil society speaking with one voice could create the political pressure both inside and outside the Cancun Convention Centre to bring the global neo-liberal agenda to a shuddering halt. Such an outcome is threatened, however, by entrenched divisions throughout the global justice movement that cut across trade union, NGO and social movement lines.

Civil society splits

Take the crucial issue of agriculture. Unions belonging to the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) agree with Via Campesina (an international peasant movement that includes the Brazilian Landless Workers and Jose Bove’s Confederation Paysanne) that food security cannot be achieved without food sovereignty – ie, the right of people to define and control their own agricultural and food policies. This would prioritise local and regional food production and consumption over export. As this is incompatible with a global agricultural free market, Via Campesina and the IUF want “agriculture out of the WTO”.

The word in the factories and fields, however, has clearly not made it up to the headquarters of the ICFTU, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) or even Oxfam. These organisations are calling for the developing world to have increased market access to industrialised country markets so it can trade its way out of poverty. There is no contradiction, they argue, between protecting small farmers while encouraging the growth of agricultural exports from developing countries.

They are wrong. As Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South argued last year in a public condemnation of Oxfam’s free-trade approach, encouraging export-oriented growth in developing countries will only benefit “monopolistic export agricultural interests” and encourage export-led development. Small farms and local control over food production would be destroyed.

The issue has led to major tensions within the UK’s Trade Justice Movement – a huge coalition of campaign groups, NGOs and trade unions. One NGO insider says: “Oxfam’s position enabled the government to say “we agree with you” on fair trade, which is not only untrue but has deflected focus away from our main priority – to expose the government’s hardline support for New Issues.”

New Issues are, themselves, a cause of similar divisions, as are trade agreements on services and intellectual property rights. Then there is a possible NGO advisory body to the WTO. Most international unions – especially the ICFTU – want this kind of ‘seat at the side-table”. NGOs like Focus on the Global South vehemently oppose it, warning that the movement could be co-opted.

In one sense, such splits shouldn”t matter given the basic consensus across civil society outlined above. However, they could be hugely significant when considering movement strategy towards the ministerial meeting.

The WTO: lobby or shut down?

Last October the National Peasant Federation of Ecuador initiated a People’s Global Action call for an Americas-wide day of action against the WTO. Hundreds of groups and movements attending January’s World Social Forum in Brazil agreed to “derail the WTO” at Cancun. Significantly, the ICFTU, formally representing 158 million workers worldwide, was not a signatory.

In May, an historic “Hemispheric and Global Assembly Against the FTAA [the Free Trade Area of the Americas] and the WTO” met in Mexico City to put this call into practice. A global day of action against the WTO has since been declared for 9 September. The day will kick off a week of peaceful, creative direct action and civil disobedience to disrupt the ministerial meeting. A “Global March against Globalisation and War” will take place on 13 September. In between, a “Peoples” Forum for an Alternative to the WTO” will run parallel to the trade negotiations, and will include a giant “Fair-Trade Fair”. Some 100,000 “alternative globalisers” are expected.

The call to “derail the WTO” is the correct one. While many “derailers” favour some kind of WTO, they realise that the neo-liberal agenda and huge political and economic clout of the US and EU (backed by a biased WTO secretariat) mean that any agreement reached in Cancun will inevitably mean yet more liberalisation and loss of democratic control – bad news for developing countries. The only strategy in this context is to stop any agreement being reached at all.

There are risks to this approach, however. If the US fails to get its way at the WTO it will turn its full coercive powers of persuasion to launching the FTAA – a far more sinister proposition. As presently drafted, the FTAA would expand an extreme version of the North America Free Trade Agreement to the rest of the American hemisphere, Cuba excluded. Corporations would be able to sue governments for imposing “costly” labour or environmental regulations on business. This ominous sceptre has mobilised a huge pan-American grassroots movement, led by the Hemispheric Social Alliance, to prioritise derailing the crucial FTAA ministerial summit in Miami. That summit begins just eight weeks after Cancun.

But we have little choice other than to try and derail both the WTO and the FTAA meetings. It won”t be easy. For Cancun especially, street protests will not be enough – activists won”t get anywhere near the convention centre. Disruptive NGO lobbying inside is thus essential in blocking consensus, but this too will be hamstrung by the clampdown on NGO numbers allowed accreditation at the ministerial.

This is why the role of the trade union movement could prove pivotal. The ICFTU and its affiliates are taking over 100 union officials, including a small group from Unison, to lobby trade negotiators. They will coordinate with the small number of trade unions that are part of social democratic government delegations, and the ETUC, which should be part of the European Commission representation. Most unions officially oppose the “derail” strategy, but if they stand firm on their declared intentions and work alongside other NGOs to stop consensus on New Issues, the meeting could collapse without agreement. If, however, unions treacherously pursue deals to get “positive language” on workers” rights in return for not working against a final agreement (however bad), then all could be lost.

The omens are not good. At Seattle, trade union leaders re-routed their massive 40,000-strong labour march away from the mass protests on the opening day of the WTO meeting in return for a meeting with Bill Clinton. More recently, a British union official was “amazed at how much the ICFTU was prepared to concede” at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development just to get a deal. This eagerness to compromise is not just ideological, but based on organisational self-interest: the ICFTU and ETUC receive large amounts of funding from Western governments. Are they really going to bite the hand that feeds them? We”ll soon know the answer.

The bluffer’s guide to… The WTO

admin — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 19:33:00 +0000

The WTO? Not another governing body for boxing is it?

Nope, it’s the World Trade Organisation.

Oooh, that sounds grand. Tell me more.

The WTO was set up in 1995 to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt). Gatt was designed to reduce taxes on imports, but the WTO’s programme has greatly expanded to include the removal of almost any restrictions placed on trade. Based in Geneva, the organisation governs international trade between 146 member countries. Every two years all member nations meet at a Ministerial Conference, which this year is in Cancun.

Sounds like a big international free trade love-in.

Hmm, not quite. Although the WTO is ostensibly democratic, the big boys from the US, Canada, Japan and the EU – known as “the Quad” – rule the roost. One developing country delegate at the 2001 Doha ministerial conference said: “If I speak out too strongly the US will phone my minister. They will twist the story and say I am embarrassing the US. My government will not even ask: “What did he say?” They would just send me a ticket home tomorrow.” The Quad meets several times a year to decide policy behind closed doors. Its decisions are then sold to less powerful governments.

What policy decisions are taken?

Official WTO policy can be summed up thus: anything deemed an obstacle to the pursuit of profit should be labelled an illegal barrier to free trade. But while liberalisation of markets is the stated aim, one north African WTO delegate said the Quad’s message to the less powerful was “you liberalise, we”ll subsidise”.

US agriculture is heavily concentrated in the hands of multinationals. High levels of subsidies were increased massively by the 2002 Farm Bill. Less developed countries don”t have the capital to subsidise their farmers. As Noam Chomsky said: “Nobody in the corporate world or government takes free trade seriously. The parts of the economy that are able to compete internationally are primarily the state-subsidised ones.”

But surely that’s a breach of WTO rules and the offending countries will be punished?

Hang on while I stop laughing. It’s one rule for the powerful and another for the rest. A Clinton administration spokesperson summed it up perfectly: “We do not believe anything the WTO says or does can force the US to change its laws.”

So the WTO is powerless then?

Not if you are a powerful state. Take the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Trips), which requires all WTO member countries to honour patent rules (including those relating to pharmaceutical products and processes), regardless of their levels of development or health needs. Trips allows 20-year market monopolies and restrictions on the measures countries can adopt to get access to cheaper medicines. Thus, many people in poorer countries are dying because of the exorbitant cost of drugs to treat diseases like HIV/Aids.

There’s also the General Agreement on Trade in Services (Gats), which creates a framework for foreign businesses to turn basic necessities like water, health and education into commodities. Earlier this year, WTO members submitted their initial lists of the services that they would like, and would agree to being, liberalised. Cancun will see a round of stock taking.

According to the EU, Gats is “first and foremost an instrument for the benefit of business”. In other words, Gats intensifies that old capitalist principle: if you can”t pay, you don”t get.

I’m not sure I like the sound of the WTO.

You”re not alone. Mass protests at the 1999 Seattle ministerial gave the WTO a global profile. The UN said the organisation’s unbalanced and inequitable approach to trade liberalisation, non-transparent procedures and inattention to the human rights implications of trade policy meant that it is a “veritable nightmare” for large parts of the world – particularly developing countries. Roll on Cancun.

Free trade on a knife edge

admin — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 19:29:00 +0000

Agriculture

Agriculture will be the linchpin of the Cancun Ministerial. Developed countries have been promising to dismantle agricultural protectionism for years now. Instead, they have done the exact opposite; the support given by Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries to agri-business has increased from around $248 billion to $311 billion.

Unsurprisingly, rural unemployment and poverty are on the rise in the South as small farmers are wiped out by the flooding of their domestic markets with Northern imports subsided below the cost of production. This is what is called “dumping”. It is exacerbated by IMF and World Bank conditionalities that direct debtor governments to apply very low duties on imported foods.

Now the US and EU are plotting a formula for agricultural tariff reductions that would allow their agri-corporations even more access to developing world markets but leave Northern protectionism untouched. The EU will no doubt argue that proposed reforms to the controversial Common Agricultural Policy (Cap) is evidence of compromise to the South. Not that anyone believes the remaining $50 billion of subsidies per year are not trade distorting.

However, the US and EU will face stiff competition in the carve-up of developing country markets from the Cairns Group of Southern agricultural exporters. The Cairns Group is led by Australia and New Zealand, and given strong support by Brazil, South Africa and Thailand (to name a few).

It seems obvious that developing countries must insist on an end to dumping before they even consider undertaking more tariff cuts of their own. However, developing country diplomats seem oddly resigned to complying with yet another round of liberalisation in return for limited exceptions on sensitive food-security and livelihood products.

Trips and public health

Despite the rich countries” supposed concessions on Trips (intellectual property rights) and public health at Doha, in December the US vetoed an agreement on allowing developing countries without manufacturing capacity to buy cheap generic drugs. Generics strike at the heart of the US pharmaceutical industry – one of the biggest contributors of electoral funds to the current US administration.

But the proposed agreement is no solution, either. The European Commission (supposedly the “good Samaritan” when it comes to generics) has insisted on a host of ‘safeguards” for its pharmaceutical giants. Countries wanting to export generic drugs would have to get through so much expensive red tape that it would probably be impossible for them to make a profit. Similar bureaucratic nightmares would exist for importers.

The only positive clause is that countries in trade blocks with a majority of members from “Least Developed Countries” might escape this ordeal. But this is clearly a strategy to buy off and split African countries from other developing countries.

The latest US pronouncements indicate that it will only accept the text it vetoed last year if all countries agree to use the 50 per cent solution for humanitarian purposes only. The definition of “humanitarian purposes” is still unknown, but this is clearly another attempt to narrow the coverage and flexibility of a possible solution.

The likelihood remains that any agreement at Cancun would severely limit the ability of developing countries” manufacturers to export generic drugs. Even for this non-solution to their public health crises, developing countries could be asked to pay a high price in other areas.

“New Issues”

The most controversial discussions in Cancun will be on whether to start talks on the “New Issues” of investment, competition, transparency in government procurement and trade facilitation.

The critical issues are investment and competition. The US and EU are desperate for negotiations to start in these areas so that, eventually, governments won”t be able to regulate foreign investors. Countries would have to change legislation so that foreign companies would be given the same treatment as local companies. As local companies in the South or developing nations would obviously not be able to compete with transnational giants, this would inevitably exacerbate the inequities of globalisation.

To the anger of the EU, some damage-limitation-minded developing countries are going along with the US proposal of unbundling the four issues. This means they may consent to transparency in government procurement and trade facilitation, but not investment and competition deregulation.

Even this would be bad news for the South. While “transparency” in government procurement does not currently include “market access”, the latter is undoubtedly the US and EU’s aim. Governments wanting to purchase goods or services would then have to give foreign companies equal access to contracts. This is dangerous since government procurement is often used as a development tool.

Ramming through a raw deal

Those unfamiliar with the WTO will probably wonder why developing countries persistently swallow such bitter pills, and why they seem poised to do so again come Cancun. The answer lies in the immense pressure they endure during the WTO negotiating process. This process does not involve consensus outcomes based on the demands of all 146 members. Instead, WTO decisions tend to be made by a small select group of about 25 countries. This happens in both the run-up to a ministerial and during the ministerial itself – in the infamous “Green Room” process.

The big gang of rich countries led by the US and EU will try and arm-twist and co-opt a small number of influential developing countries like Brazil and South Africa. Any decisions taken are then presented as a fait accompli to the broader membership.

Countries that dare to resist will be blackmailed, bribed or threatened. Aid and loans could be promised or withdrawn, preferential trading arrangements put on the line, even complaints and smear campaigns made against any ministers, diplomats or (in the case of India at Doha) governments.

Developing countries aren”t completely compliant, however. Last April the “Like-Minded Group” of countries (which includes Cuba, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda and Zimbabwe) was so infuriated by the exclusive, undemocratic and non-transparent process at Doha that it insisted on proper rules of procedure – including the impartiality of the WTO secretariat – before and during ministerials.

Not only were these demands ignored prior to Cancun, but the WTO has shifted into an even more secretive and non-transparent mode of consultations – what the WTO director general Supachai Panitchpakdi called “flexibility”. Instead of facilitating negotiations, the secretariat and chairs have tightly controlled them. A draft text for Cancun only emerged on 24 July, just three working weeks before the ministerial. This left developing country delegations with little time to respond to the text and coordinate among themselves. And rather than being a consensus document of the WTO membership, the draft was issued by the chair. It supposedly reflects his best judgment of a compromise between members, but clearly favours developed country interests.

In the face of such persistent Machiavellian strategies, developing countries seem to be suffering from resistance-fatigue. But unless they take the extraordinary step of standing ground under pressure, the package they will be offered at Cancun is likely to have grave implications for their people.

Ultimately, the positions taken by developing country ministers at Cancun and the outcome of the ministerial will depend on how those ministers deal with the conflicting pressures. Will the domestic pressures they face from civil society, and perhaps even national parliaments, be sufficient to counter the arm-twisting of the major powers? And will ministers be able to stand up to their convictions? For the innumerable vulnerable populations in the South, war is being waged.Aileen Kwa is a policy analyst working with Focus on the Global South

NGO launches bid to force EC to open up GATS negotiations

admin — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 17:24:00 +0000

The UK environmental group took up its right to formally complain after officials at the EC twice refused to publish documents relating to ongoing trade liberalisation talks.

Friends of the Earth wants the EU to publish documents containing EU negotiating demands as well as requests by other countries to the EU as part of ongoing discussions towards the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).

Critics of GATS want negotiations made public because they believe the treaty will undermine democratic control over the provision of essential services such as health and education, as well as disrupting the delivery of these services to the poor, particularly in the Third World.

Friends of the Earth’s Corporate Globalisation Campaigner Eve Mitchell said: -Given the potential of GATS to affect much of our daily lives, it is vital that the process by which those agreements are reached is transparent and democratic. Parliamentarians and members of the public have simply not had access to key information.-

Mitchell said: -We want to get the information to people who need to know – nurses, unions – and to provide the possibility of some other input into the process, other than the government.-

Friends of the Earth asked the EC to publish details of requests by non-EU countries, such as the USA, to liberalise the provision of services in the EU, as well as details of the demands made by the EU to other World Trade Organisation members to open up their services to the private sector.

The EC refused to release the documents saying that to publish the information would undermine the protection of the public interest in regard of international relations. Friends of the Earth then made a formal complaint to the European Ombudsman, Professor P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, a former national ombudsman in Greece.

Although the Ombudsman has no binding powers on EC institutions, he can recommend that an EC body changes its position and failing this, can bring the matter to the attention of the European Parliament. However, a spokesman for the Ombudsman office said it normally takes six months to reach a decision.

Red Pepper has learned that the European Ombudsman has already dealt with a number of cases involving public requests for access to trade-related documents, many involving bilateral negotiations between the EU and US.

In addition to NGOs such as Friends of the Earth, other organisations have called for GATS negotiations to be made public. The European branch of the International Parliamentary Network, which includes a number of MEPs, said in October 2002: -GATS negotiations have been undertaken in total secrecy, with no democratic oversight whatsoever. Nothing justifies the fact that parliamentarians are not informed concerning these ongoing negotiations.-

-It is unacceptable that European and national parliamentarians, citizens, public service trade unions and NGOs should only be informed afterwards, when everything has already been decided, so that so-called “consultations” of the European or national parliaments become more formalities. Transparency should be the rule.-

A document leaked to NGOs and the media on 16 April 2002 showed the detailed requests made by the EU to 29 of its principal trading partners, including the USA and Canada, as well as less developed countries such as Brazil, Philippines and Indonesia. Requests included the liberalisation of major service sectors including water supply, waste treatment, energy, transportation, scientific research and postal services.