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Jefferson23

(30,099 posts)
Fri Jun 27, 2014, 12:46 PM Jun 2014

Analysis Article - Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) - Financial Services Annex

2014-06-19

Memorandum on Leaked TISA Financial Services Text
by Professor Jane Kelsey, Faculty of Law, University of Auckland, New Zealand

This memorandum provides a preliminary analysis of the leaked financial services chapter of the Trade in Services Agreement dated 14 April 2014. It makes the following points:

The secrecy of negotiating documents exceeds even the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and runs counter to moves in the WTO towards greater openness.
The TISA is being promoted by the same governments that installed the failed model of financial (de)regulation in the WTO and which has been blamed for helping to fuel the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).
The same states shut down moves by other WTO Members to critically debate these rules following the GFC with a view to reform.
They want to expand and deepen the existing regime through TISA, bypassing the stalled Doha round at the WTO and creating a new template for future free trade agreements and ultimately for the WTO.
TISA is designed for and in close consultation with the global finance industry, whose greed and recklessness has been blamed for successive crises and who continue to capture rulemaking in global institutions.
A sample of provisions from this leaked text show that governments signing on to TISA will: be expected to lock in and extend their current levels of financial deregulation and liberalisation; lose the right to require data to be held onshore; face pressure to authorise potentially toxic insurance products; and risk a legal challenge if they adopt measures to prevent or respond to another crisis.

Without the full TISA text, any analysis is necessarily tentative. The draft TISA text and the background documents need to be released to enable informed analysis and decision-making.

Unprecedented Secrecy Reverses WTO Trend of Disclosure

The cover sheet records that the draft text will not be declassified until 5 years after the TISA comes into force or the negotiations are otherwise closed. Presumably this also applies to other documents aside from the final text. This exceeds the 4 years in the super-secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA)! It also contradicts the hard-won transparency at the WTO, which has published documents relating to negotiations online for a number of years.1

in full: https://wikileaks.org/tisa-financial/analysis.html

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Analysis Article - Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) - Financial Services Annex (Original Post) Jefferson23 Jun 2014 OP
Bookmarking and reading. pa28 Jun 2014 #1
I think so too, although not comforting. n/t Jefferson23 Jun 2014 #2
K&R Joe Shlabotnik Jun 2014 #3
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