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0 pointsZigurd10y ago0 comments

I have to question whether secret negotiation is separate from content. If you want it to be really separate from content, you have to keep it from being a mechanism for inserting horrors that hide among the pages of a treaty nobody will read and understand.

For example if you limited each treaty to 10 provisions of 10 pages each then that would make the document understandable, AND it would incentivise the backers of important provisions to shut out the garbage if the garbage will sink the whole deal.

As it is we get at least hundreds of pages of garbage hiding among thousands of pages of soporific minutia.

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hga10y ago

I get the impression that treaties are studied a lot more closely than the now typical 1,000+ page bills, in part because they come from the executive, they don't come with the understanding that "the leadership wants you to vote for this bill they drafted". More of the tension between branches of the government that our Founders were fond of.

Didn't the (Democratic back then) Congress fail to ratify at least several of the last few treaties they were presented with? When was the last successful one??? These things tend to have lots of enemies, I have some hope these new ones, assuming negotiations are even successful (only the secrecy gives any hope for that, and I just found out on Wikipedia that the Millennium Round between Doha and Uruguay didn't even get off the ground), will get examined carefully enough. Certainly the ground has been prepared.

For that matter, are we sure the language is going to be that ugly? Here's it for the Uruguay round https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/legal_e.htm and I drilled down to this bit on copyright IP: https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_04_e.htm (all IP here: https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_01_e.htm).

Agriculture tends to be one of the worst areas, here's the first of two pages: https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/14-ag_01_e.htm Ugly, but not particularly opaque. E.g.:

4. (a) A Member shall not be required to include in the calculation of its Current Total AMS and shall not be required to reduce:

(i) product-specific domestic support which would otherwise be required to be included in a Member’s calculation of its Current AMS where such support does not exceed 5 per cent of that Member’s total value of production of a basic agricultural product during the relevant year; and....

Particularly good is there's no "this line in this law is changed to....".

And let's not forget that in the US treaties can do only so much, many of them need enabling law to actually take effect.

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