24 Nations Services Trade (TISA) Secret Negotiations Shows TNC Interest Dominating Civil Society

Wikileaks released a second batch of the most updated draft texts on the proposed TISA, along with substantive analysis, on each of four cross-cutting annexes: Financial Services, Telecommunications, Electronic Commerce, and Maritime Transport. This follows on their release yesterday of texts on Domestic Regulation, the “Movement of Natural Persons,” Transparency, and Government Procurement, along with what Wikileaks called the journalistic holy grail: the TISA’s Core Text. The negotiating texts are supposed to remain secret for five years after the deal is finalized or abandoned.

The leaked TISA texts reveal the dangers of sweeping, so-called “trade” agreements that are negotiated outside of public scrutiny. (Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement also being negotiated in secret). The financial Services in TISA advocates extreme deregulation.

The ILO Maritime Labour Convention explicitly sets minimum standards, with member states being encouraged to go above and beyond its provisions. These are to be diluted in TISA.

Perhaps the most explosive text is that on Electronic Commerce which negotiates an open internet behind closed doors. The recent leak of the TISA Annex on e-commerce. TISA includes requirements that could damage privacy protections. TISA should be debated publicly, in order to ensure that adequate, express privacy safeguards are included.

TISA negotiations largely follow the corporate agenda of using “trade” agreements to bind countries to an agenda of extreme liberalization and deregulation in order to ensure greater corporate profits at the expense of workers, farmers, consumers and the environment. The proposed agreement is the direct result of systematic advocacy by transnational corporations in banking, energy, insurance, telecommunications, transportation, water, and other services sectors, working through lobby groups like the US Coalition of Service Industries (USCSI) and the European Services Forum (ESF).

The Wikileaks follows others, including a June 2014 Wikileaks revelation of a previous version of the Financial Services secret text; the December 2014 leak of a U.S. proposal on cross-border data flows, technology transfer, and net neutrality, which raised serious concerns about the protection of data privacy in the wake of the Snowden revelations.

The TISA is currently being negotiated among 24 parties (counting the EU as one) with the aim of extending the coverage of scope of the existing General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in the WTO.