The EU’s proposed reforms to Trade and Sustainable Development chapters: a big change, or more of the same?

27 October 2022 Camille Vallier is a Fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory and Research Fellow in Trade and Sustainable Law at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex. This blog was originally published by Trade 4 Sustainable Development. After having defended a sustainable development approach to trade based on cooperation and dialogue for the past decade, the European Union (EU) announced in June 2022 its intention to tighten its approach. The recent Communication “The power of trade partnership: together for green and just economic growth” presents the EU’s new strategy, which, among other measures, plans to extend the general state to state dispute settlement mechanism to the TSD chapter and to include the possibility of trade sanctions for non-compliance with certain provisions of the TSD chapter. These new measures have been adopted in response to a long-lasting observation that the current system does not enable a full and satisfying implementation and enforcement of sustainability provisions. […]

By |2022-10-27T16:38:40+01:0027 October 2022|UK- EU|1 Comment

Should trade policy be used to tackle forced labour?

16 September 2022 Erika Szyszczak is a Fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory and Professor Emerita of Law at the University of Sussex. On 23 February 2022, in a Communication on decent work worldwide, the EU announced a new legislative initiative tackling issues of sustainability and working conditions in global trade. [1] On the same day, the European Commission published a proposal for a Directive on corporate sustainability due diligence. […]

By |2022-09-16T17:57:43+01:0016 September 2022|Uncategorised|1 Comment

What do the General Election Manifestos say about International Trade? The Scottish National Party

31 May 2017 Compiled by Fellows of the UKTPO Brexit will leave many areas of UK policy open to change. International trade policy is among the most important of these for UK prosperity and also among the most immediate because the status quo cannot simply be extended. This is the sixth in a series of blogs reporting what the major political parties say about trade policy in their 2017 manifestos, as they become available. The UK Trade Policy Observatory (UKTPO) has set out a series of issues that it believes should be considered in any election manifesto that might form the basis of the UK’s future trade policy. The table below checks whether or not the SNP Manifesto mentions these important elements explicitly or implicitly. Following that, we offer a brief commentary on the treatment of trade policy in the manifesto. […]

By |2017-05-31T11:14:37+01:0031 May 2017|UK - Non EU, UK- EU|0 Comments
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