TAFTA

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Must read

• The web-dossier
• The negociators
• Collection of documents and articles
• Procedures
• All element of the wiki related TAFTA

Related negotiations

• ACTA - Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
• CETA - Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement
• GATS - General Agreement on Trade in Services
• TAFTA - Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)
• TiSA - Trade In Services Agreement (TISA)
• TRIPS - Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.
• Rounds of International Negotiations:
  • Uruguay Round
  • Doha Round also known as Doha Development Agenda (DDA) - official page
• ...

TAFTA stands for Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement and is also known as TTIP, which stands for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. It is being negotiated between the European Union and the United States of America. Although it calls itself a free-trade agreement, it covers many more issues other than trade. It touches for instance on questions related to copyright, and data protection, and introduces a system of investory-state dispute settlement (ISDS).

Essential Points

When ACTA was voted down by the European Parliament in July 2012 it was due to public opposition to the propositions it contained on copyright. Now TTIP/TAFTA is trying to introduce very similar if not identical propositions. Although officially copies of the text being negotiated were not released, leaks have demonstrated that articles on intellectual property are included in TTIP/TAFTA. This free-trade negotiations address not only questions of copyright however but touch on many other subjects. This is not an exhaustive list, but a list of topics and problems related to it.

• Personal Data (Privacy issues). The European Parliament stated that, considering Snowden's revelations, that data protection not be negotiated in TAFTA.
• Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). In order to make it easier for corporations to take states to court in case that they feel a contract was broken, this mechanism would give corporations more power vis-a-vis democratically elected governments.
• Copyright questions. As stated above, TTIP/TAFTA is a kind of ACTA by the backdoor. It appears to contain many of the same clauses as ACTA.
• Transparency. This is an issue in and of itself. Neither the European Commission nor the United States Trade Representative (USTR) have published official documents and it is therefore difficult for civil society actors to take positions on these negotiations.
• Other issues such as fracking, ...

For a treasure trove of documents on TTIP/TAFTA go here:

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