The EU has succeeded in turning what began as a legal cleansing into a de facto attempt to renegotiate CETA by autumn 2015. The change of government in Canada played into the hands of the EU, as new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was open to reconsidering the document negotiated by his Conservative predecessor Stephen Harper. On February 29, 2016, the final text of the CETA contribution “Legal Clean-up” was published. The EU press release states: “Following the legal revision of the text […] All key elements of the EU`s new approach to investment, as set out in the EU`s TTIP proposal of November 2015 and contained in the recently concluded EU-Vietnam FTA, have been included in the final text of CETA. A new version of CETA`s investment chapter was therefore negotiated under the guise of legal review. In September 2014, CETA negotiations were concluded and the legal review process was launched. Around the same time, public protest reached its peak against investor–state arbitration, a mechanism that allows private investors to file claims against governments to make amends for violations. Investor–state arbitration is included in thousands of bilateral investment treaties and is also expected to be part of the CETA and T-TIP negotiations. The EU has tried to counter public criticism by inserting a reformed version of investor–state arbitration into the September 2014 version of CETA.
The FD&C Act defines cosmetics as items intended to be applied to the human body to cleanse, beautify, promote attractiveness or change appearance without affecting the structure or functions of the body. This definition includes products such as skin creams, lotions, perfumes, lipsticks, nail polishes, eye and face makeup preparations, shampoos, perms, hair dyes, toothpastes, deodorants and any material intended to be used as an ingredient in a cosmetic product. Soap products consisting primarily of an alkaline salt of fatty acid and not labelled other than cleaning the human body are not considered cosmetics within the meaning of the Act. In the case of CETA`s investment chapter, we were surprised that the text published at the end of the negotiations in 2014 and the version resulting from the February 2016 legal clean-up differed by 19%. To get an idea of the magnitude of this percentage, 19% was also the difference in text we found when we compared the recently completed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) investment chapter with its most similar predecessor, the United States-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, signed in 2006. However, the latter case concerned two separate contracts, while the first concerned two versions of the same contract. • TPP, TTIP, CETA; Roll-back NAFTA, et al, Tribunal Penalties (ISDS) paid by Canadian lil` guy; $125 million and $25 million in legal fees for Reneging Corporate America. The US pays `0`. “You should have known”; President Bush. Ban the future TPP, et al, ISDS.
I am happy that we live in the freest country in the world. Please note that Free is a protected term that no longer means what we thought. I like how we now allow private companies to dictate legal conditions and sanctions. Let freedom resonate. But it`s not a shower. On the contrary, the TPP gets a “legal peeling”. They have forgotten that the government can now use all the details it accidentally discovers when searching for terrorism, for whatever legal reasons it wishes. Universal criminal charges instant from millions for anyone who owns even a few MP3s that they can`t prove they bought. Once all major treaty negotiations have been concluded, the final text of the agreement will be reviewed by a group of legal experts from States parties. This procedure is commonly referred to as “legal cleansing” and may result in minor changes to the text of the contract.
However, what happened during the legal review process of the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is something extraordinary: entire articles were added and the controversial investor–state arbitration architecture was replaced by a new investment court system. To find out what really happened during the legal clean-up phase, we developed a new text-based tool in the form of data that traces textual differences between IITs. So what`s the take-home message? On the one hand, the EU has played its cards wisely by incorporating its updated investment preferences into an already finalised text, thereby improving its negotiating position vis-à-vis the US. On the other hand, it is also worrying that procedures formally described as mere legal cleansing can de facto lead to a renegotiation of a treaty text that has already been completed. The CETA negotiation process thus highlights the added value of text analysis in order to unpack the legal clean-up process and make changes between contractual versions visible and analyzable. He added that this is clearly a significant change that could lead to the criminalization of many harmful but absolutely not-for-profit activities that may have many legitimate objectives. There was long pressure from former copyright players to use the TPP to strengthen criminal sanctions, and many of the worst proposals were removed from the deal – but with this “legal cleansing,” things moved massively toward criminalization. And that`s a problem.
In early November, the “final text” of the TPP was finally released. The USTR even posted the thing on Medium, claiming it was now transparent after years of secrecy. As we have been told many times, the outcome document is not subject to change. All that remained was to do a “legal clean-up,” a final process in which lawyers comb through the document word for word to ensure there were no typos or mistakes. Legal peeling is not when substantial changes can be made. In its revised form, the only criminal provision from which a country is exempted in these circumstances is the one to which the footnote is attached, namely the provision on ex officio measures. This means that, according to this amendment, all other criminal procedures and sanctions must be available, even if the infringement has absolutely no impact on the rightholder`s ability to exploit his work on the market. The only enforcement provision that countries can refuse in such cases is the power of state officials to take legal action themselves. The deal was finalized Monday and later in the week in the United States. Trade Representative Michael Froman told reporters that cleaning up every word in a document covering 30 chapters can take about a month.
As long as the “clean-up” continues, lawmakers can keep their hands free from the TPP. But in 2016, they will be pressured to make a decision. Most analysts predict that voting will take place between Easter and Memorial Day. And yet. EFF`s Jeremy Malcolm discovered a clear shift in the “legal cleansing” of the intellectual property chapter that will massively expand criminal penalties for copyright infringing activities that have no impact on the real market. Technically, the undergrowth has just replaced the word “paragraph” with “paragraph” in the following sentence: Since the change highlighted above is undeniably a substantive change, the only basis for the change that could be made during the legal clean-up would be if it is a mistake. But is this a mistake? In an in-depth comparison of the two versions of CETA, we found that only a fraction of the 19% difference is due to strict legal adjustments: for example, simplification and clarification of wording (e.g. CETA 2014: “No Party may. in CETA 2016: “A Party may not.
in Article 8.5 Performance Requirements), conversion from singular to plural, refinement of article numbering, etc.
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