India’s trade talks with EU may collapse
Daily Times (Pakistan) | Friday, March 06, 2009
India’s trade talks with EU may collapse
Iftikhar Gilani
NEW DELHI: India’s trade negotiations with the 27-nation European Union, the country’s largest trade partner accounting for 21 percent of merchandise exports, are threatened to collapse because of the non-trade issues like human rights and democracy issues including investigations into the alleged “extra judicial killings” in Jammu and Kashmir injected in the talks.
At stake is the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) which India has been negotiating since 2007 and which would have resulted in duty-free trade of goods, services and investments at a time when India’s exports to the EU countries is fast growing.
The talks slated this month have been called off by the EU citing “operational reasons,” though insiders attributed it to India not agreeing for the new conditionality injected by a draft report of the Members of the European Parliament (MEP).
The report filed in December by a delegation of MEP, who are part of the Committee on International Trade of the European Parliament wanted inclusion of human rights and democracy issues in the CEPA talks and an international investigation into the alleged “extra judicial killings” in Jammu and Kashmir.
The report also called for legally binding and enforceable social and environmental standards in the CEPA talks, besides taking up the issues like child labour, illegal smuggling of tiger skins to China-controlled Tibet and monitoring of the trade ships entering the Indian ports by the EU authorities.
A proposed addition to the draft report also calls for the European Commission to refrain from committing to liberalise capital movements in the backdrop of the ongoing financial crisis.
The Indian trade envoys maintain that talks are bound to stall if the EU introduces these clauses in the negotiations. “These are ploys to put pressure on India through non-trade issues at a time when the global slowdown is impacting them,” said a government official familiar with trade negotiations.
India has opposed the inclusion of environment and social issues also in the current Doha round of trade negotiations under the World Trade Organisation.
Among the many non-trade issues raised in the draft report relate to the religious minorities and continuing alleged persecution of the human rights defenders, extra-judicial killings and alleged unmarked mass graves in Jammu and Kashmir. It also calls for the Indian government to grant access for the UN Special Rapporteurs to investigate these mass graves.
