UN official calls for suspension of TTIP talks over fears of human rights abuses

A senior UN official has called for controversial trade talks between the European Union and the US to be suspended over fears that a mooted system of secret courts used by major corporations would undermine human rights.

Alfred de Zayas, a UN human rights campaigner, said there should be a moratorium on negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which are on course to turn the EU and US blocs into the largest free-trade area in the world.

Speaking to the Guardian, the Cuban-born US lawyer warned that the lesson from other trade agreements around the world was that major corporations had succeeded in blocking government policies with the support of secret arbitration tribunals that operated outside the jurisdiction of domestic courts.

He said he would becompiling a report on the tactics used by multinationals to illustrate the flaws in current plans for the TTIP.

De Zayas said: “We don’t want a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots. We don’t want an international order akin to post-democracy or post-law.”....

More than 97% of respondents to an official EU survey voted against the deal...

“The bottom line is that these agreements must be revised, modified or terminated,” [De Zayas] said.

“Most worrisome are the ISDS arbitrations, which constitute an attempt to escape the jurisdiction of national courts and bypass the obligation of all states to ensure that all legal cases are tried before independent tribunals that are public, transparent, accountable and appealable.

“Article 103 of the UN charter says that if there is a conflict between the provisions of the charter and any other treaty, it is the charter that prevails.”

The Guardian
UN calls for suspension of TTIP talks over fears of human rights abuses
Phillip Inman, Economics correspondent