www.agp.org | Archives - WTO info: Lamy 'evaluates' EU GATS consultation

Yesterday, DG Trade issued a "Reply from Commissioner Lamy to the submissions made in response to the public consultations launched in November 2002 in the DDA services negotiations". See bottom of this e-mail. Also available at http://europa.eu.int/comm/trade/services/rpldda_en.htm

Lamy writes that the Commission received over 3000 submissions to the consultation and that "all the contributions received were taken into account"

This is something of a bad joke. Lamy consciously omits that the large bulk of the 3000 submissions were in fact generated by a protest e-mail action coordinated by GATSwatch and ATTAC groups in many EU member states, which questioned the sincerity of the consultation and demanded full transparency on the GATS negotiations, an immediate halt to the negotiations and an assessment of the existing GATS agreement. (See http://www.gatstwatch.org/EC-consult.html. While the Commission happily ignored all these points Commissioner Lamy now even has the cheek to say that the consultation had a big impact on the content of the final EU GATS offer.

As was already written in the sample letter for the e-mail action (of the which the Commission received well over 2,500 copies): "[...] we are concerned as civil society members across Europe, about the seriousness with which our responses will be taken."

Erik Wesselius
Corporate Europe Observatory / GATSwatch

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Reply from Commissioner Lamy to the submissions made in response to the public consultation launched in November 2002 in the DDA Services negotiations — June 2003

Now that the EU has tabled its conditional offer in the services negotiations in the context of the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) I would like take this opportunity to thank all of those who took the time to submit their comments to my services during the public consultation.

It was clear from the outset that in order to make a meaningful move in the services negotiations, in particular vis-à-vis developing countries, we needed a transparent process. I therefore launched an unprecedented public consultation process with all stakeholders including industry, trade unions, and NGOs and published a comprehensive consultative document in November 2002. I was very pleased to see the strong public interest that was shown in response to the consultation and which resulted in more than 3000 submissions to the Commission. While I would have liked to respond to each individual submission, the sheer number of contributions unfortunately makes this impossible. But I would like to stress that all the contributions received were taken into account and the Commission's work in preparing the services offer was greatly assisted by the quality of the large number of comments we received.

In the end we were able to table a substantial and meaningful offer to our trading partners, in particular developing countries, that offers expanded trading opportunities in a large number of sectors such as telecoms, financial services, business and professional services, distribution, environmental services, construction, news agencies and tourism. The EU offer at the same time fully preserves public services within the EU and our continued ability to design and implement appropriate institutional and regulatory frameworks aimed at ensuring for example equitable access to essential services.

We have made the full text of the offer available so that everybody can access it : http://trade-info.cec.eu.int/doclib/docs/2003/april/tradoc_113003.pdf