Fast tracking the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) in Congress excludes any opportunity for meaningful public input about the agreement and leads to bad policy, ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ Law Professor David Levine says in this week’s ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ Law Now faculty commentary.
Levine has made presentations to the negotiators at several negotiating rounds for the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement. His commentary follows:
“Congress appears , otherwise known as ‘fast track,’ for the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). If this happens, it will likely close the door to any possibility of meaningful public input about TPP’s scope and contours. That’s a major problem, as this encompassing around 800 million people in the United States and eleven other countries, will impact areas ranging from (who gets it) to rights (who has them). But, unless you are a United States Trade Representative (USTR) (which almost always means that you represent an industry, like entertainment or pharmaceuticals), or, under certain limited circumstances, , your chief source of TPP information is . In other words, if Julian Assange gets his hands on a draft TPP text, you might see it, once he decides that it should be made public. Of course, you’ll have to hope that the copy that you see is current and accurate.
“There have been no – not one – formal releases of the TPP’s text. Thus, this 21st century agreement has been negotiated with 19th century standards of information access and flow. Indeed, TPP has been drafted with a degree of secrecy . Some degree of secrecy and discretion is necessary in any negotiation, but the amount of secrecy here has left .
“This process, if you want to call it that, defies logic. Margot Kaminski has labeled the entire process Perhaps most problematically, ‘transparency theater’ has caused widespread opposition to TPP, like mine, that might otherwise not have materialized. Standing alone, the TPP’s negotiation process is sufficient to cause opposition. Additionally, the process has seemingly led to bad substance, which is a separate reason to oppose TPP.
“Meanwhile, fast track will mean that Congress will on the entire deal. Therefore, fast track will exacerbate that informational vacuum, and the public will not be able to do much more than accept whatever happens. In essence, an international agreement negotiated with no meaningful public input – and to some unknown degree — is about to be rushed through the domestic legislative process. [Note: I submitted testimony in by Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic].
“At this point, if you are at all concerned about the TPP’s process, the best thing that you can do is and urge them to vote “no” on fast track. You could also before fast track is voted upon (i.e., right now). Finally, you could help assure that two other important international agreements currently in negotiation but in earlier stages – and – are negotiated more openly. How? By , and calling your elected officials and when things remain murky. I’ll have much more to say about these processes in the coming months.”
is an Associate Professor of Law at ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ School of Law and an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School (CIS). He is a 2014-2015 Visiting Research Collaborator at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). He is also the founder and host of Hearsay Culture on KZSU-FM (Stanford University), an information policy, intellectual property law and technology talk show for which he has recorded over 200 interviews since May 2006.
ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ Law Now is a weekly series of faculty commentary on legal current affairs.