Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-12-13-Speech-4-046"
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"en.20071213.5.4-046"2
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"Mr President, let me start by thanking Mr David Martin for his report and by underlining the crucial importance of this dossier. The EU-Korea Treaty will be the first application of the new EU trade doctrine Global Europe, a doctrine that is highly controversial, not least because it seeks such deep market access conditions through the removal of all kinds of barriers to all-out import penetration, precisely at a time when more and more people are becoming aware that there are very many losers as well as some winners in a completely liberalised global economy.
On the positive side, the report sets out some very good standards for trade and social and environmental fields, which Greens absolutely support, and in that respect I think the report sets a very important precedent for further upcoming parliamentary responses to other free trade agreements, with India and ASEAN, for example. So we welcome the fact that the report insists that there must be no exceptions to the rule that access to the European market is conditional on compliance with environmental protection standards.
We welcome the fact that it demands that the trade agreement with Korea incorporates binding social and environmental clauses and, to our mind, this by itself makes it difficult to contemplate that the North Korean Kaesong industrial complex would be included within the FTA rules. Most importantly, it intends to give teeth to those binding clauses by demanding that they are subject to the standard dispute settlement mechanism.
But we do have some serious misgivings about this report as well. First, there is the demand to scrap all non-tariff barriers (NTBs) to trade without any attempt at differentiating what really constitutes a legitimate NTB and what does not. We should not assume that everything that prevents unfettered free trade is an illegitimate obstacle. There are some very good reasons to qualify trade, especially when public policy wants to put in place controls for social, health or environmental reasons.
We are also opposed to the full introduction of the so-called ‘Singapore issues’ into the free trade agreement. Again there are good reasons why total investment freedom or public procurement should remain outside the scope of a trade agreement. Korea had a devastating experience with the free flow of capital in the late 1990s and they have used sheltered public procurement policies to get back on their feet since then. Now, it is not up to us to judge whether they should offer those items on their side, but we are allowed to judge for our side, and my Group does not support giving unlimited freedom to foreign investors in Europe or destroying the possibility of engaging in public spending for social goals through specific domestic procurement policies."@en1
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