Last week, European Trade Commissioner traveled to the US to meet with US Trade Representative Ron Kirk. There was anticipation that the US and EU might announce their intention to negotiate a free trade agreement. However, it did not happen.…
Excerpt from a Fact Sheet from Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. Click here for the full Fact Sheet Eli Lilly and Company has initiated formal proceedings under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to attack Canada’s standards for granting…
Europolitics reports that European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht will travel to Canada next week “in the hope of concluding trade talks with the two countries before the EU’s 27 heads of state and government meet in Brussels.” However, Canadian…
[Reposted from the AFINET website] The Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (AFTINET), the Public Health Association and three other health organisations have made a submission to the review of pharmaceutical patents because the issue of patents and medicine is a…
Inside U.S. Trade reports that USTR has begun an “internal review of the controversial pharmaceutical patent proposal that U.S. trade officials tabled” earlier in the TPP negotiations. However, USTR has also signaled new text will not be ready by the…
Europolitics.org reports that the U.S.-EU High Level Working Group (HLWG) on Jobs and Growth, co-chaired by Europe’s Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht and US Trade Representative Ron Kirk , will likely release a report proposing the negotiation of a “comprehensive…
The European Commission has withdrawn its request for the European Court of Justice to rule on the legality of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Though the parliament rejected the agreement by 478-39 on July 4, the trade trade commission had requested…
[Originally posted on accessnow.org] Last month, the Peruvian Government made public its intention to hold Internet Service Providers (ISPs) responsible for copyright infringement by their users. Peru committed to doing so — imposing intermediary liability — in a Free Trade…
Yesterday the EU Parliament adopted a resolution on a Digital Freedom Strategy in EU Foreign Policy, which focuses on human rights and access to the internet. The resolution and accompanying report was crafted by MEP Marietje Schaake, who guided the…
Statement by Jane Kelsey, University of Auckland: The New Zealand government has imposed unprecedented restrictions on registered stakeholders as it hosts the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations in Auckland this week. “We turned up this morning and found we are locked out…
Tobacco giant, Philip-Morris, brought actions this year under investor-State arbitration mechanisms in investment treaties to challenge laws limiting (in Uruguay) or prohibiting (in Australia) the display of its trademarks in tobacco packaging. This has caused the Australian government to take…
German news publishers are trying to require licensing fees to be paid to them for indexing their content by search companies through a proposal that may move forward in the German Parliament later this week. This ‘ancillary copyright‘ (text here)…