Five ways to ensure trade treaties work for everyone
Trade agreements should recognise economic growth as a means to common good objectives, including health and environment, say academics
health and environment, rather than an end in itself.
❚ Current and future international health, environmental protection, and human rights treaties should have enforceable priority over business interests in trade and investment treaties.
❚ Trade and investment treaties should not only explicitly defer to international health, environmental protection, and human rights treaties, but also include their own enforceable health, social and environmental objectives. Currently, such objectives in trade treaties do not have mechanisms to ensure any effective action to achieve the objectives. Trade and investment treaties must also include enforceable corporate responsibilities for contributing to health, environmental, human rights and other common good objectives. Currently, the only clear responsibilities of multinationals are profits to their own shareholders.
❚ New treaties need to remove the ability of investors to sue states through secret arbitration (ISDS). Provisions for ISDS remain the default position in our treaties – as seen in the upcoming Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership with Asian countries. Government should instead use our own courts for disputes arising under trade and investment agreements. If transnational dispute resolution systems are needed, they must use decision makers that represent wider objectives. Currently, international treaty dispute processes are dominated by trade lawyers and economists, with assumptions that prioritise business.
❚ The process for making treaties must be transparent. The public needs to know what its government is signing up to, with open policy statements, independent assessment of treaty impacts, and independent avenues of citizen involvement. Currently, businesses have privileged access to negotiations, with citizens the last to hear about crucial provisions. We ask for active co-design of new treaties with civil society, not simply ‘‘consultation’’. Ideas along these lines have been developed for fairer treaties, including those by the UN agency UNCTAD. New Zealand government agencies need to move their thinking to include such models, so they can advise government from beyond a ‘‘business first’’ perspective.
Trade is fundamental to society, and legal rules on trade are essential. But trade law should not advance the interests of multinationals at the expense of working towards the public good.
Louise Delany is a senior lecturer, Louise Signal a professor, and George Thomson an associate professor at the Department of Public Health, University of Otago, Wellington. The above is based on their article ‘‘International trade and investment law: a new framework for public health and the common good’’, which was published in the open access journal BMC Public Health in May.