[DC-Trade] Proposal for Dynamic Coalition document on trade transparency

[Jeremy Malcolm]

Dear all,

Today my organization the EFF has launched an advertising campaign
around trade transparency reforms, which I would like to propose as a
starting point for a document that this Dynamic Coalition could produce
as an output this year.

The advertisements can be seen in POLITICO's Morning Trade newsletter at
http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-trade/2017/05/nafta-notification-whats-happening-and-when-220315
(you might need to disable your ad blocker to see the banners, but there
are also text messages in the middle and at the end of the newsletter). 
The ads link to this page on EFF's website which summarizes five
recommendations, and the rationales for these: https://www.eff.org/trade.

The campaign is targetted at U.S. trade policymakers and is hence very
U.S.-centric (even to the point of sounding a little jingoistic), and a
couple of the recommendations are specific to the U.S. trade advisory
process.  Nevertheless, I believe that the core concepts should find
broad agreement amongst members of this Dynamic Coalition and that we
ought to be able to fashion a consensus document that at least finds
inspiration from the five recommendations made here.

I won't repeat the complete rationales for the recommendations here
because you can read them for yourselves at https://www.eff.org/trade,
but the headlines are:

 1. Publish U.S. textual proposals on rules in ongoing international
    trade negotiations
 2. Publish consolidated texts after each round of ongoing negotiations
 3. Appoint a "transparency officer" who does not have structural
    conflicts of interest in promoting transparency at the agency
 4. Open up textual proposals to a notice and comment and public hearing
    process
 5. Make Trade Advisory Committees more broadly inclusive

One of the items in this Dynamic Coalition's 2017 action plan is "To
develop a multi-stakeholder approach to facilitating the transparency
and inclusiveness in international trade negotiations and the domestic
consultation processes".  Although that's open-ended, it could include
the development of a consensus document containing a set of principles
that generalises from the above five recommendations, and that's what
I'm proposing.  At this point, I am asking for your feedback on the idea.

If there is broad agreement on the idea, the next step would be to form
a drafting subcommittee that would propose a strawman text for further
discussion by the full Dynamic Coalition.  If you support the idea of us
developing such a document, are you also interested in being part of the
drafting subcommittee?

Thanks and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the above.

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm
Senior Global Policy Analyst
Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://eff.org
jmalcolm at eff.org

Tel: 415.436.9333 ext 161

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