TTIP: The Saga Continues
On January 28 2016, ahead of the 12th TTIP negotiations round, ECOS published a position paper to express concerns regarding the TTIP chapters relating to EU-US regulatory cooperation and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT). In these chapters, the EU suggests facilitating the harmonisation of standards based on mutual interest and exchange, for instance through a process of mutual recognition where EU and US standards could equally provide presumption of conformity with relevant European legislation. We have argued that closer regulatory convergence and technical cooperation on standards under TTIP might threaten citizens’ welfare and the environment. In the past weeks, we have been meeting with European Commission officials and negotiators to discuss these concerns and exchange views.
Following the 12th round of negotiations, the European Commission published the EU revised proposal on regulatory cooperation. In this new text, the EU underline ‘Cooperation related to voluntary consensus standards developed by private standardization bodies is not covered by the provisions of this Chapter; reference is made to [Chapters on TBT, SPS and specific and sectoral provisions -to be identified]’. Standardisation appears to be excluded from provisions in the EU-US regulatory cooperation chapter, and is specifically referred to in the TBT chapter. However, the EU textual proposal related to TBTs has yet to be updated, with its last publically available version dating back to March 2014.
Therefore, ECOS will pursue its engagement in TTIP debates and will be, in particular, analysing provisions from TTIP relating to standardisation as soon as they are made available. The 13th round of TTIP negotiations is expected to resume in the week of April 25.
