Don’t Keep The Trans-Pacific Partnership Talks Secret

[From the New York Times Opinion pages, by Margot Kaminski:]  COLUMBUS, Ohio — WHEN WikiLeaks recently released a chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, critics and proponents of the deal resumed wrestling over its complicated contents. But a cover page of the leaked document points to a different problem: It announces that the draft text is classified by the United States government. Even if current negotiations over the trade agreement end with no deal, the draft chapter will still remain classified for four years as national security information. The initial version of an agreement projected by the government to affect millions of Americans will remain a secret until long after meaningful public debate is possible. [Note: article mentions a US FOIA case by IP-Watch.]

National security secrecy may be appropriate to protect us from our enemies; it should not be used to protect our politicians from us. For an administration that paints itself as dedicated to transparency and public input, the insistence on extensive secrecy in trade is disappointing and disingenuous. And the secrecy of trade negotiations does not just hide information from the public. It creates a funnel where powerful interests congregate, absent the checks, balances and necessary hurdles of the democratic process.

Free-trade agreements are not just about imports, tariffs or overseas jobs. Agreements bring complex national regulatory systems together, such as intellectual property law, with implications for free speech, privacy and public health.

The level of secrecy employed by the Office of the United States Trade Representative is not typical of how most international agreements are negotiated. It’s not even how our negotiating partners say they want to operate. Yet it is the way that the Obama administration handles trade deals, from a failed anti-counterfeiting agreement more than two years ago to the TPP today. The trade representative’s office keeps trade documents secret as national security information, claiming that negotiating documents — including work produced by United States officials — are “foreign government information.”

The justification for secrecy in trade is that negotiations are like a poker game: Negotiators don’t want to reveal their hand too soon, or get pressured by concerned domestic constituencies. But the trade representative’s office takes this logic too far. After being forced to turn over documents in a 2002 lawsuit, it began regularly classifying trade documents. Now the office uses classification to invoke the national security exemption to open government law. Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic is challenging this behavior in a lawsuit. (I submitted testimony in the case.)

For the full article, please see here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/opinion/dont-keep-trade-talks-secret.html?_r=0