Legitimate claims for disclosure about FTA negotiations
Hankyoreh, South Korea
Editorial
Legitimate claims for disclosure about FTA negotiations
29 June 2006
A public hearing about the free trade agreement (FTA) being negotiated with the United States came to an abrupt end when protesters opposed to the deal interrupted the meeting. It is unfortunate that the hearing could not be an open forum for the exchange of opinion. The conservative media are criticizing the protesters, calling them undemocratic for blocking the proceedings with physical strength. However, before looking only at the end result of what transpired, they should look at the government for the reasons behind why things happened that way.
The main umbrella organization leading the opposition wants the government to disclose the details of its earlier, first round of negotiations. Protests want to know how a hearing could be held without providing information about what has already been agreed upon. You can see the event, then, as the government just wanting to go through the motions. A member of the protest organization captured the mood when he said the government had only tried to create an "alibi" for itself, to make it look like there had been public debate, when in fact there was not real debate and most of the panel speakers were people in favor of the FTA.
Korea’s top negotiator rejected calls for full disclosure of what has been agreed upon, saying it would expose Korea’s negotiating strategy if everything discussed was explained in detail. The government promised the U.S. that documents exchanged in the negotiating process would remain undisclosed for a period of three years. It is unreasonable to expect interested parties, who could be put in difficult positions because of the agreement, to simply accept the government’s explanations.
Conditions for the U.S. and Korea are not the same. In the U.S., it is Congress that has the authority over trade agreements, and the negotiation process is subjected to a lot of checks and balances a long the way. Also, commerce law stipulates that the government provide an advisory council made up of interested private parties with information about the negotiations. The details are not disclosed to the media, but they do reach the potentially affected parties and make dialogue possible. Korea has no such process or regulations, and if what is being agreed to is not made public then everything has to be entrusted to the government. The government says it will make the documentation public when the negotiations are over, but by then the bus will already have gone by. That will only lead to a repetition of what happened years ago, when the government went about the Uruguay Round of negotiations without adequately listening to public opinion, only to incur serious conflict afterwards.
Any hearing that happens at this point must discuss the questions of whether an FTA with the U.S. would be a good idea and what the agreement should look like. There has to be uninhibited debate about how the negotiations are progressing. It is nonsense to want to have a debate without letting people know what both sides have been talking about. That is like expecting someone to draw an elephant when you have only shown him the elephant’s foot. Furthermore, from the very start, the government has not made the public confident enough to trust it with the negotiations. It has always appeared obsessed with just getting an FTA signed. Are not its intentions apparent in the words of one government official, who said the negotiations have already crossed the Rubicon?
The Democratic Liberal Party and Lawyers for a Democratic Society are suing the government to force it to disclose information about the initial draft of sections of the eventual agreement. We hope to see a whole different kind of response. If the lawsuit fails, the ruling and opposition parties should have the National Assembly make the executive branch disclose the details and, based on that, they should examine what the effects of an FTA would be.
