Presentations at TTIP Stakeholder Forum

Christiane Gerstetter and Nils Meyer-Ohlendorf spoke on regulatory cooperation and investment protection in the stakeholder forum "TTIP re:negotiate" in Berlin on 17 November 2014. The event was co-organized by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC (USA).

Christiane Gerstetter discussed provisions on regulatory cooperation under TTIP – a hot topic in the current debate on TTIP. She argued that, if plans of the EU Commission as currently known were implemented, there could be a risk that trade interests could gain more weight in the future EU policy discourse. Her contribution was based on a prior study on the topic of regulatory cooperation.

Investment protection has been a particularly contentious issue of TTIP. To make this discussion more concrete, Nils Meyer-Ohlendorf discussed investment protection under CETA, a possible model for TTIP. He argued that CETA is not the beginning of a new era of investment protection. Key CETA investment rules, such as provisions on fair and equitable treatment or indirect expropriation, are very similar or even identical with existing rules. CETA contains some improvements on Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) although they do not address the fundamental issue that ISDS is superfluous or even harmful when State Parties have well functioning legal systems, such as Canada or the EU. The presentation and more detailed comments on investment protection under CETA are available for download here.

The forum was attended by about 60 participants, mostly from civil society, media and academia as well as political institutions.