No TPP Popular Sector Declaration – Mexico
1. Negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) behind closed doors violated our human right to be informed and now the governments involved are pressuring their Congresses to ratify the accord. With this in mind, the social organizations from those countries in the Americas involved in the TPP are speaking out in protest against accepting this supranational legislation that has been fashioned behind people’s backs to fulfill the wishes of big capital. We will not stand by and see our human rights violated.
2. Our struggle against the TPP is not only just and legitimate, it is also shared by the United Nations (UN). We declare that the TPP is illegal based on international law and therefore should not be ratified by the legislative powers involved.
3. The international recognition provided to the many different human rights is the product of lengthy struggles by the people leading to an understanding based in International law that these rights must supersede any other type of ‘rights’. For this reason commercial treaties can not be superior to governmental agreements to respect and implement the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all other associated agreements and protocols.
4. The Human Rights Commission of the UN has the mandate to build a binding legal instrument governing the obligations of transnational corporations and commercial interests with respect to human rights. The TPP seeks to set a precedent that is contrary to that mandate. While the mechanisms and commitments found in the TPP which favour the transnationals are obligatory, the chapters related to Work (Chapter 19), Environment (Chapter 20), Skills Development and Cooperation (Chapter 21), Development (Chapter 23), Small and Medium size Businesses (Chapter 24), and Transparency and Anti corruption (Chapter 26) are, in contrast, voluntary, not enforceable or subject to sanctions if not complied with.
The juridic anomaly to be found in the structure, the content and the institutionalization of trade treaties such as the TPP, that consecrate Rights, is not compatible with international public order and contrary to bbbcorporate rights while leaving the populations defenceless, is recognized in the July 2015 Report by the UN’s Independent Expert for the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order where it states that the TPP, by putting itself above Human the dispositions of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and the observance of respectable (local) custom.
