10:43 AM Jul 22, 1996

WTO 'GUIDELINES' ON RELATIONS WITH NGOS

Geneva 19 July (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- The General Council of the World Trade Organization has agreed on guidelines for arrangements on relations with NGOs that promises 'greater transparency', but not for direct involvement of non-governmental organizations in the work of the WTO or its meetings.

Under Art. V:2 of the WTO agreement, the General Council is authorized to "make appropriate arrangements" for consultation and cooperation with NGOs "concerned with matters related to those of the WTO".

In deciding on the guidelines, the WTO General Council said that WTO members recognized the role NGOs can play to increase awareness of the public in respect of WTO activities and agree in this regard to improve transparency and develop communications with NGOs.

"To contribute to achieve greater transparency Members will ensure more information about WTO activities in particular by making available documents which would be derestricted more promptly than in the past. To enhance this process, the secretariat will make available on on-line computer network, the material which is accessible to the public, including derestricted documents.

"The Secretariat should play a more active role in its direct contacts with NGOs who, as a valuable resource, can contribute to the accuracy and richness of the public debate. This interaction with NGOs should be developed through various means such as inter alia the organization on an ad hoc basis of symposia on specific WTO-related issues, informal arrangements to receive the information NGOs may wish to make available for consultation by interested delegations and the continuation of past practice of responding to requests for general information and briefings about the WTO.

"If chairpersons of WTO councils and committees participate in discussions or meetings with NGOs, it shall be in their personal capacity unless that particular council or committee decides otherwise."

"Members have pointed to the special character of the WTO, which is both a legally binding intergovernmental treaty of rights and obligations among its Members and a forum for negotiations. As a result of extensive discussions, there is currently a broadly held view that it would not be possible for NGOs to be directly involved in the work of the WTO or its meetings. Closer consultation and cooperation with NGOs can also be met constructively through appropriate processes at the national level where lies primary responsibility for taking into account the different elements of public interest which are brought to bear on trade policy-making."

Taken as a whole, the guidelines would appear to imply that outsiders will be told, after the decisions are made, what the WTO bodies, and the secretariat (largely run and controlled in the interest of the majors) want the public to know. There is no assurance that before issues are taken up for consideration or negotiations, these will be made known to the public, so that there could be wider public debates within countries and internationally. Currently, the range of consultations by governments in their national spheres is mainly with affected industries and industry-interests.

Any international negotiations involving a large number of countries and players inevitably involves at some stage or other, a few key players begin negotiations in a small group, iron out their differences and reach an accord, which is then presented to the totality of the participants for acceptance.

But in the WTO, most of the discussions, consultations and negotiations are first conducted informally in small groups, and brought up before formal meetings open to everyone only for record and acceptance of what is decided in small conclaves before, and occasionally brought up before informal full meetings for what is often described as 'transparency', without the other participants having the right or ability to change things.

A whole range of new issues, involving limitations on individual country policies and putting economic policy-making in countries in straight-jackets, are being discussed in the WTO, under the socalled "informal Heads of Delegations" meetings, chaired by the WTO Director-General, and with 'non-papers', but with little informed public debate or full information.

Sometimes, even governments at capitals, and different sections of governments, are unaware of what goes on in such conclaves, whether their representatives were present at the meetings, reflected their government views forcefully or kept silent or allowed a country's case to go by default.

Whatever the merits of these arrangements in the past, when the GATT dealt only with trade across frontiers, and impinged only in a relatively small way on a country's domestic economic space and policy, with the WTO trying to take on ever-increasing role on how countries should run their domestic economies and limit national decision-making, this method of reaching decisions, based on power equations involved in the small groups, is meeting with increasing resistance in many countries, with non-governmental organizations increasingly involved in organizing resistance to such decisions presented to countries on a take-it-or-leave it basis.

The WTO efforts to increase transparency do not appear aimed at reducing this situation.

Even media representatives who regularly follow and report on the WTO affairs do not get information and documents as of right, and briefings reflect 'news management' more than in other international organizations.