independent | Today’s shock leak of the text of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
(TTIP) marks the beginning of the end for the hated EU-US trade deal,
and a key moment in the Brexit debate. The unelected negotiators have
kept the talks going until now by means of a fanatical level of secrecy,
with threats of criminal prosecution for anyone divulging the treaty’s
contents.
Now, for the first time, the people of Europe can see for themselves
what the European Commission has been doing under cover of darkness -
and it is not pretty.
The leaked TTIP documents, published by Greenpeace this morning, run
to 248 pages and cover 13 of the 17 chapters where the final agreement
has begun to take shape. The texts include highly controversial subjects
such as EU food safety standards, already known to be at risk from
TTIP, as well as details of specific threats such as the US plan to end
Europe’s ban on genetically modified foods.
The documents show that US corporations will be granted unprecedented
powers over any new public health or safety regulations to be
introduced in future. If any European government does dare to bring in
laws to raise social or environmental standards, TTIP will grant US
investors the right to sue for loss of profits in their own corporate
court system that is unavailable to domestic firms, governments or
anyone else.
For all those who said that we were scaremongering and that the EU
would never allow this to happen, we were right and you were wrong.
