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TWN
Info Service on WTO and Trade Issues (Mar21/23) Dear friends and colleagues, We are pleased to share with you the updated TWN Briefing Paper on International negotiations by virtual means in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic by Vicente Paolo B. Yu III. The paper reviews the practices and challenges faced especially by developing country negotiators in the past 12 months as negotiations continued at different levels of intensity in several multilateral fora. It concludes the following: “ … in the context of international negotiations, including in the UN and in the WTO as well as in other forums such as the UNFCCC and the CBD, substantive negotiations through virtual meeting modalities cannot replace the conduct of in-person dynamic and substantive negotiations on issues that will have substantive policy impacts and implications at the domestic and international levels for countries. This is because virtual negotiations and meetings have significant constraints with respect to transparency, inclusiveness, and extent of effective participation that tend to affect developing country participants more than their developed country counterparts. Digital communication tools and media can support making negotiations more efficient and, in these pandemic times, allow negotiators of governments to stay connected and exchange information with one another during the period that in-person meetings are not possible or severely restriction. But their logistical and technological limitations, the varying abilities of human participants to process information and fill in information gaps resulting from virtual communication glitches, the potential for decreasing the ability of government negotiators especially from developing countries to effectively shape negotiated outcomes, as well as increasing even more the relative power imbalance between developed and developing countries in international negotiations, would all suggest that if in-person negotiations cannot be held in the period preceding the major international conferences that had been postponed to 2021 (e.g. WTO Ministerial Conference 12, UNFCCC COP26, CBD COP15, UNCTAD 15, Oceans Conference 3), informal exchanges of information, including technical work whenever possible, using virtual means among the Parties should be continued. These can be used to identify divergences and convergences and discuss and clarify technical options or issues that Parties may need clarity on. However, the negotiation and adoption of substantive policy outcomes should be postponed until such time that official and formal in-person negotiations can once again take place. Only open, transparent and fully participatory in-person negotiations would allow for meaningful equality of participation and access to such negotiations by developing countries and ensure that any negotiated outcomes can also reflect their views and perspectives.” The paper does recognise “cases where the near-term urgency of the situation requires that a multilaterally-negotiated agreement be obtained with respect to a particular substantive policy issue. This could, for example, be the TRIPS COVID-19 waiver proposal; or immediate debt relief for developing countries as a means to combat the economic impacts of the pandemic or of climate change. Not all substantive policy issues should be the subject of virtual negotiations. Only those issues which are deemed by the international organisation’s membership to be of sufficient criticality or urgency, particularly to address a key global issue such as addressing the pandemic, should be subjected to virtual negotiations. In cases where a substantive policy issue is one of implementation of existing treaty obligations such as, for example, in the UNFCCC with respect to the enhancing or implementation of NDCs or in the CBD with respect to the implementation of previously-agreed biodiversity targets, doing so would not most likely not require having virtual negotiations as these can be achieved through national-level actions.” The full paper is available here. With
best wishes,
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