July 8, 1999
The European Commission said today it wanted to make sustainable development the "central benchmark" of a new round of world trade liberalisation negotiations which are due to start later this year. In a communication, the EU executive set out its views on what the EU should aim for during the three-year "millennium round" of World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks in which environmental considerations should be "effectively addressed throughout the negotiations".
The communication gives Sir Leon Brittan, acting vice president of the European Commission, room to expound his beliefs that the negotiations should be more inclusive of developing countries and should be seen to address the concerns of the general public, such as environmental protection, in a way that previous trade talks have not. His communication says that "environmental considerations should be integrated into the EU's approach" in order to aim for sustainable development through trade, but he also highlights three environmental issues that need to be discussed in particular.
The first is to get greater legal clarity on the relationship between WTO rules and measures taken to comply with multilateral environmental agreements to make sure they are not in conflict. The paper says WTO members would come to an agreement on how environmental measures taken under such agreements can be accommodated within free trade rules.
A second clarification that the Commission wants concerns the status of schemes such as ecolabels, to make sure they can be used without becoming barriers to trade. The paper calls for a "clear understanding that there is room within the WTO to use such market-based, non-protectionist instruments as a means of achieving environmental objectives and of allowing customers to make informed choices".
Thirdly, the paper recommends that the WTO look to clearly define certain key environmental principles, especially the precautionary principle. The Commission wants to make sure WTO members retain the right to take precautionary action - like putting emergency bans on certain products - when there is a risk to health or the environment, but only in justified cases. It says the WTO should agree on "multilateral criteria for the scope of action possible" under the precautionary principle.
The Commission is currently drafting a separate communication on the use of the precautionary principle which should be published in the autumn, in advance of the WTO talks beginning at the end of November in Seattle, USA.
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