G20 Counter-Summit, St-Petersburg, Russia

OPENING: Resisting Global Corporate Governance: Voices For System Change

Venue: International Business Center (www.spbmdc.ru), St. Petersburg, naberezhnaja Reki Smolenki 2, Metro Vasileostrovskaya

SEPTEMBER 3, 2013

10.00 – 12.00 – Registration, book-bazaar (books of speakers and their organizations) and photography exhibition

12.00 - OPENING SESSION: RESISTING GLOBAL CORPORATE GOVERNANCE: VOICES FOR SYSTEM CHANGE

G20 Counter-Summit Press Conference
St-Petersburg, Sept. 2, 2013

With Boris Kagarlitsky (Institute for Globalization and Social Movements, IGSO, Russia), Diana Aguiar (Brazil Network for the Integration of Peoples -REBRIP, Brazil), Kevin Danaher (Global Exchange, USA), Au Loong Yu (China Labor Net, China)

On the 3-4th of September in St. Petersburg a counter-summit, a large-scale international event that aims to be an alternative to the September G20 Summit and to develop new principles of economic and social policy that are not based on the "Washington Consensus" will be held. The international counter-summit organised by the "Post-globalization" initiative will bring together world-renowned experts, politicians, economists, social scientists from Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America. In the frames of the counter-summit panel discussions, seminars and public lectures will be held.

Today (11 June 2013) the WTO-Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rules (TRIPS) Council adopted a decision granting Least Developed Countries (LDCs) an eight-year extension of the transition period, (deferring the time within which LDCs to implement the TRIPS Agreement), without the pernicious mandatory “no roll-back” clause (contained in the previous extension decision) which developed countries pushed hard to include.

In a letter to WTO member governments, 188 organizations representing a wide diversity of civil society from developing and developed countries, called on government representatives in Geneva to “abandon the negotiations towards a binding agreement on Trade Facilitation in advance of the upcoming 9th Ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Bali." The letter was organized by the Our World Is Not for Sale (OWINFS) network. The letter states “binding rules on Trade Facilitation should not be promoted either inside the WTO through the proposed Trade Facilitation (TF) agreement, nor through other avenues such as bilateral or regional Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) or Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs)."