Global Policy Forum

By Michael Littlejohns

As if the World Trade Organization had not enough problems after the protest demonstrations and clashes with police that disrupted its session in Seattle last year, not to mention the political fuss over China's eagerness to join, comes a UN Economic and Social Council report that calls the agency "a veritable nightmare" for developing countries -- among which, nuclear power China considers itself a member.

Transparency is the buzzword in the UN system nowadays, from the Security Council on down, but the report says WTO "has demonstrated a particular opacity" in face of the demand for openness, which Secretary General Kofi Annan has praised -- even in the architecture of the New York headquarters in a new report on his proposals to upgrade the place.

"No other organization has been more closely associated with the phenomenon of globalization," says the report, which adds that WTO's basic rules are "grossly unfair and even prejudiced," reflecting an agenda serving dominant corporate interests "that already monopolize the arena of international trade." (Mr. Annan, in a speech he never got to deliver in Seattle, was a bit ambivalent on the subject of globalization and its benefits, or lack thereof, for the third world.)

WTO is said in the Ecosoc report to have ignored the premise that most free trade is controlled by multinationals. Within this context, it claims, basic rules are "a fallacy."

China, whose human rights record has been a subject of close scrutiny on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in the West , may not be unhappy with the authors' comment that while WTO's trade and commercial activities have serious rights implications, there is scant and, at that, only oblique reference to human rights principles.

"The net result is that for certain sectors of humanity -- particularly the developing countries of the South -- the WTO is a veritable nightmare," says the report, which goes on as follows.

"The fact that women were largely excluded from the WTO decision-making structures, and that the rules evolved by WTO are largely gender-insensitive, means that women as a group stand to gain little from the organization."

Seldom has a UN-associated agency come under such critical scrutiny. And there is more. WTO's one member-one vote democracy is superficial masking "a serious inequality in both the appearance and the reality of power in the institution," say the authors J. Oloka-Onyango and Deepika Udagama.

Among several issues that have concerned many developing countries is WTO's attempt to link trade, human rights, labor standards and the environment as a means to resist market access for aid and technology flows to third world states, they say. (Western countries might approve of this as a means to improve environmental and working conditions, but the report suggests that it boils down to a sort of neocolonialism.)

Then there's this dig at potential critics in the developed lands: "The commitment of Northern countries to a genuinely democratic and human rights-sensitive international regime is rendered suspect by an extremely superficial rendering of the meaning of human rights and by the numerous double standards that are daily observed in the relations between countries of the North and those of the South. Thus, 'human rights' conditionality when applied in contexts such as trade depends on a range of largely subjective elements extrapolated from the much broader human rights regime." (Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, where are you?)

Human rights are used merely as an opportunist fulcrum to achieve the objective of liberalized markets, this extraordinarily outspoken report alleges, adding, "For example, why is there almost never any linkage between the demands being made and the observance and respect for economic, social and cultural rights? . . . Even when the linkage is made to civil and political rights, it is fraught with inconsistencies and national subjective interests predominate."

So there!

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