Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Trade Agreements: MEPs receive insight into TTIP documents – ZEIT ONLINE

member of parliament and provincial governments can see from next Monday to the secret documents to the trade agreement TTIP the Federal Ministry of Economics according to a newspaper report. This was department chief Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) announced in a letter to the President of the Bundestag Norbert Lammert and the Bundesrat President Stanislaw Tillich (both CDU), report the papers of Funke Media Group.

In a reading room Bundestag deputy and members of the Federal Council could see so-called consolidated negotiating documents – which make both the EU’s position as well as the United States marked. In support of Gabriel led according to the report, the involvement of national parliaments is a precondition for better acceptance and legitimacy for the negotiations of the European Commission with the US on a transatlantic free trade area.

The previous secrecy was an important point of criticism of the TTIP negotiations. To date, only around 40 representatives of federal ministries in Berlin US Embassy documents have realized according to the report. End 2015, negotiators for the EU and the US agreed on an opening also for national parliaments.

The federal government had “used since the beginning of the negotiations for this to make the negotiation process on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership transparent both to the public as well as to the parliaments of the EU Member States “Gabriel wrote, according to the newspaper report, the letter said.

Among other things, the Greens had criticized so far not a single minister had personally inspected the highly explosive TTIP documents. In addition, the Government had informed the Bundestag only four of the twelve rate available in the reading rooms texts. Reports there had been only to chapters on sanitary measures on trade in goods, technical barriers to trade as well as to small and medium enterprises.

Burning issues such as agriculture or public procurement, dispute settlement between States, competition or cross-border trade in services had not been treated, criticized the Greens.

The negotiations on a transatlantic free trade area had started in July-2013. You should give the economy on both sides of the Atlantic a boost by tariffs and trade barriers are dismantled. The agreement is controversial.

Everything important to TTIP visit our topics page: http://www.zeit.de/thema/ttip-freihandelsabkommen

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