Small Steps: Ending Trade's Splendid Isolation from Human Rights

Abstract

With their unremitting and inevitable intersections, trade and human rights would seem ideal candidates for natural alliance to accomplish their complementary goals. Trade's guarantees of collective freedom, non-discrimination, property rights, and the rule of law protect the corresponding human rights to individual liberty, protection from discrimination, the right to private property, and guaranteed access to the judicial system. Tragically, the reality has seen neither alliance nor coordination. Often, even simple recognition of the other policy is lacking.Three propositions portend for us the way to end trade's splendid isolation from human rights. First, global trade rules contain an abundance of effective but unexplored safe harbors to shelter human rights measures from sanctions for violation of trade's non-discrimination and other defining pillars. Second, the unheralded indirect effects of both the World Trade Organization (WTO) and regional trade free agreements (FTAs) in forcing governments to act with greater transparency and accountability have resulted in substantial advancement of human rights compliance. Finally, we can no longer seriously question that governments have an obligation to include in trade agreements enforceable provisions that ensure compliance by signatories with fundamental human rights.At GATT's creation in 1947, negotiators could be forgiven the failure to appreciate trade's inevitable effects on human rights. Such ignorance no longer can be countenanced in the crafting of trade treaties that have transformed the world over the past 30 years into an unstoppable engine of economic growth with near fathomless power to change the standard of living of every global citizen. Each new treaty is not only born into the corpus of existing public international law, including human rights treaties and custom, but each new trade negotiation must accept the facts that half a century of ever-broader trade rules have revealed. Trade's inexorable growth has, as economists predicted, created winners and losers. Trade's winners mostly have been transnational corporations able to reduce costs by seeking out countries with a comparative advantage in their products, usually without concern either for the human lives or the natural resources abused in that search. Trade's biggest losers have been the human rights of workers, of environmental and thus human health, of women, of indigenous populations, of the poor, of development and developing countries generally.Trade agreements must assume some responsibility to deliver the human rights promised by a dozen U.N. treaties. For the same reasons that a developing country cannot today justify the worst forms of child labor by citing to similar U.S. and European abuses during industrialization of those countries in the 19th century, trade negotiators cannot fail to use the unique power of globalization to eliminate poverty, to make a reality of non-discrimination, to protect the traditional knowledge of indigenous populations, to ensure the raising of women out of second-class status, to protect core labor rights. Trade's right to regulate for human rights purposes must become trade's obligation to regulate consistently with human rights law.