Services / GATS / TISA

The new leaked text of the Annexes on Energy and Environmental Services for the Trade in Services Agreement was published by Wikileaks on the 3rd of December. TiSA is being negotiated by 22 countries representing 70% of global trade behind closed doors in a secret room in Geneva while all eyes are on Paris where UN public talks are in full swing to design a new climate regime.

The city of Zurich has voted to declare itself a TISA-free zone, in a move which emphasizes a growing resistance to the secret trade talks. A proposal introduced to the Zurich Communal Council by the Green Party was passed by a firm majority and could help to establish a precedent for other regions across Europe who may hope to do the same.

On 5 September 2015 a very large majority of the Frente Amplio, the governing political coalition in Uruguay voted against continuing to be part of the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) negotiations taking place in Geneva. These plurilateral negotiations are taking part outside the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its General Agreement on Services (GATS) and have generated concerns over the adverse impacts of the type of services liberalization pushed for by developed countries led by the United States, the European Union and Australia.

The Frontlines Initiative is a joint project of four national public sector unions - the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) - which joins forces with sister unions in Colombia to fight against the privatization of public services and to strengthen each other’s struggles to defend human and labour rights. The delegation in Colombia received an important briefing on the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), a proposed international trade treaty that, if ratified, will put public services in Colombia, Canada and 48 other countries at extreme risk.

Some 341 global civil society organisations (CSOs) on Wednesday underlined that if the upcoming tenth ministerial conference (MC10) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to be held in Nairobi, Kenya is to be a "success", it must deliver on development and turn around the WTO.

Today, 341 global civil society organizations – including development advocates, trade unions, farmers’ organizations, consumer and environmental groups from over 100 countries – sent a letter to WTO members today urging them to abandon the WTO expansion talks and instead focus on an urgent agenda to fix existing damaging rules in the WTO.

WikiLeaks has published secret “core text” related to the controversial trade agreement currently being negotiated behind closed doors between the US, EU and 23 other countries. Big corporations look to be the biggest winners in the deal.

Today, Wikileaks has posted recent texts from April and May 2015, including the proposed core text and annexes on domestic regulation and transparency, and provided expert analysis of those texts (wikileaks.org/tisa/).

Today, Wikileaks released a second batch of the most updated draft texts on the proposed TISA, along with substantive analysis, on each of four cross-cutting annexes: Financial Services, Telecommunications, Electronic Commerce, and Maritime Transport. This follows on their release yesterday of texts on Domestic Regulation, the “Movement of Natural Persons,” Transparency, and Government Procurement, along with what WikiLeaks called the journalistic holy grail: the TISA’s Core Text.