SMC, ILO AND THE HANSENE FACTOR

6:46 AM Dec 6, 1996

SMC, ILO AND THE HANSENE FACTOR
Singapore 6 Dec (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- To the controversies beginning to swirl around next week's Singapore Ministerial Conference (SMC) of the WTO, has been added another: the purported withdrawal of an invitation to the ILO chief, Michel Hansenne, to address the SMC.

Media reports here said, the stand of four or five developing countries, among them India and Pakistan, has forced the withdrawal of the invitation to Hansenne, who is arriving here over the weekend to speak at an ICFTU-sponsored meeting here.

Trade officials who did not want to be named, however, put the issue in some perspective.

They said, early in the year, in terms of the SMC, the General Council decided that all countries and international organizations having an observer status at the General Council would be able to attend the plenary meetings at Singapore and speak, if they wanted to.

However, the ILO is not an observer at the General Council, only to one of the subordinate bodies of the WTO, the one under the GATS, dealing with 'movement of natural persons'.

As a result, while organizations like the IMF, World Bank, UNCTAD and a few others, who have observer status at the General Council, were issued invitations to attend.

In the case of others, it was agreed that decisions will be taken on a case-by-case basis, and decisions taken by consensus decision-making.

In the case of the ILO, it would appear, that after the last Quad summit meet, Canada and a few others have been talking about an invitation to the ILO to address. But it had been formally mooted only in the last days of November -- by when, the social clause issue had become a very hot and controversial issue.

Apart from the ILO, there were other international organizations that wanted an invitation to participate. Among them were UNEP and UNIDO. All these were brought up together as part of the informal consultation process at an informal meeting of the General Council in the week of 25 November.

With the US and the WTO head bringing up the labour standards issue to be part of the Singapore Draft Ministerial Declaration, and with the somewhat heated debates the previous week, at the ILO Governing Body on this issue, what would otherwise have been less controversial or even non-controversial, became very controversial, one trade diplomat said.

As a result, at that informal meeting, it became clear that there was no consensus on inviting any organization which was not an observer at the General Council.