Protecting Human Rights in a Global Economy: Challenges for the World Trade Organization
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Description
Since the late 1980s, the ascendency of market economics coupled with a revolution in information technology has accelerated the process of globalization while institutions of international governance have been unable or unwilling to catch up. Privatization and the related phenomena of deregulation, structural adjustment and a myriad of new bilateral, regional and multilateral trade and investment agreements have proceeded without credible efforts to conceptually and practically address their impacts on legally protected human rights. This paper addresses the tensions and potential synergies between the two legal regimes governing trade and investment and human rights. Trade and investment agreements, as well as the practices of international business, must be held accountable to existing human rights law. The spirit of human rights law must frame the development of trade law if either is to achieve its goals. The ability of capital to move across borders with increasing ease in the era of globalization has implications for human rights. While human rights violations existed long before this period of rapid economic integration, the growing number of sectors covered by multilateral trade and investment agreements has set the stage for a new variety of human rights abuses which have not yet been suitably addressed. Consider the example of Nigeria where in the last decade foreign oil companies and military governments have laid waste to vast tracts of land in the oil-producing areas and responded with chilling brutality when the Ogoni people sought to protect their fundamental rights. In several Asian countries and other emerging markets, businesses and governments have supported practices which violate the rights of workers with impunity through sweatshops and child, slave, unfree, and bonded labour. At the same time, globalization has served to focus heightened attention on such practices in general, including abuses that existed before globalization but were often ignored. Global “free” trade and universal human rights regimes are both post-war phenomena. However, they have developed on parallel, separate, and sometimes inconsistent tracks. The contemporary international economic order, which is based on the push for a single global market, has its basis in the Bretton Woods System. The origins of the global trading system were laid with the International Trade Organization (ITO), which was to be an integral part of the blueprint for global peace and security after WWII. A fair international trading regime was thought to be essential to global peace. Beggar-thy-neighbour economic competition among the western countries—with escalating retaliatory tariffs and quotas—was seen as a cause of instability in Europe. Such policies were blamed for the rise of fascism, and ultimately, the outbreak of WWII. Significantly, the Bretton Woods architects were worried about more than beggar-thy-neighbour competition from overt trade barriers. The ITO was designed to address restrictive business practices and fair labour practices. Several factors, however, changed this vision and resulted in a different multilateral trading order. First, the ITO proposal failed. In its place, a minimal set of rules, concerned mostly with border measures and explicit domestic discriminatory policies against imports, was adopted. The General Agreement on Tarriffs and Trade (GATT) had virtually no institutional framework, and nothing, for example, about concerns such as fair labour practices. Secondly, with the bifurcation of the world by the Cold War, the GATT essentially became an entity for the liberalization of trade among western countries. Without a doubt, it achieved considerable success in the reduction or elimination of a range of trade barriers among these countries. Freer trade became an engine of growth for the project for economic, social and political reconstruction in Europe and Japan. The alliance of governments and private initiative were instrumental in the recovery efforts. Once developing countries began to join the GATT in significant numbers, they soon felt their needs were not addressed adequately by the post-war regime. Many were caught up in the East-West conflict. However, some minimal amendments to the original GATT agreements allowed developing countries certain exemptions or reduced obligations to liberalize trade. Ironically, developing countries were able to erect very high barriers to many of the most important exports of other developing countries, even as tariffs on products traded among the developed countries fell. The GATT, which was concerned exclusively with the negotiation and monitoring of rules for freer trade, operated in splendid isolation from the other international institutions of the post-war order. Many in GATT expressed pride and satisfaction that the multilateral trading order had made progress towards rules-based free trade while other international institutions remained paralyzed or anemic because of geopolitics.
Source Publication
Human Rights in Development: Volume 6, Yearbook 1999/2000
Source Editors/Authors
Hugo Stokke, Arne Tostensen
Publication Date
2001
Recommended Citation
Howse, Robert L. and Mutua, Makau, "Protecting Human Rights in a Global Economy: Challenges for the World Trade Organization" (2001). Faculty Chapters. 866.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/866
