Restricted WTO Documents Outline Non-Transparent Cancun Preparatory Process
Please find below the full text of the points made by the General Council Chair and the Director General of the WTO on May 8 of this month, followed by the 'Checklist of Issues' for Cancun circulated on May 27. The comments by the two Chairs were made at the first of a series of informal open-ended Head of Delegations (HODs) meeting. These meetings will continue to be informal and without any written records and include the Ambassador plus one other person from each WTO delegation. 'Open-ended means that all members are welcome to come, but given the frequency of these meetings in the run up to Cancun, it is unlikely that all heads of delegations will attend. Usually, anywhere from about 20-70 ambassadors attend. For many developing country ambassadors it will simply be impossible to attend because of the number of meetings taking place in the WTO as well as the UN. However, it is also clear that once the HODs process gets underway and closer to Cancun, many will not know about all the meetings taking place.
An extremely problematic feature of this process is that the Chair states, 'Clearly, the informal HODs will need to be complemented by consultations by both of us in a variety of smaller configuration to address specific issues and problems. It goes without saying that we will use this open-ended HODs forum to report on such activities in order to ensure the transparency of the process.' Using the informal HODs process for 'report backs', rather than the General Council or the TNC, removes any documentation of the consultations that are taking place. The secretariat will not produce minutes and thus people not present in the room (including governments who do not have missions in Geneva) are completely removed from this process. This statement institutionalizes green rooms and makes it appear perfectly normal that consultations by the Chair and the DG should be done without a written account of the discussion. It also exempts them from providing return records of 'report back' sessions.
It is clear that the next three months will involve a series of informals at the HODs level and often informal meetings with just the DG, the General Council Chair and a few delegations. This will be in addition to all of the informal meetings regarding the long and complicated list of negotiating issues outlined in the Checklist. The number of meetings this entails is astounding.
On May 27, the DG and the GC chair have circulated a checklist of issues that you find below. This checklist highlights the areas that require action 'before or at the Fifth' Ministerial. The Secretariat's interpretation of the Singapore Issues here is problematic because it removes the convoluted language of the Doha Text and ignores the Chairman's statement issued in Doha. The language merely states ' decide by explicit consensus on the modalities of negotiations.' This Checklist is a preliminary template of what a declaration may look like leading to Cancun.
These two documents are important to understand the process leading to Cancun. The DG and Chairman's statements clearly indicate, as stated in Aileen Kwa's recent article 'Countdown to Cancun', that WTO is in the process of becoming 'Chair driven' rather than 'member driven.' This compounded by the fact that no written records will be provided of the Chairs' consultations, the Cancun process will in effect, be completely unaccountable.
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Job(03)/889 May, 2003
Informal Consultation at the level of Heads of DelegationThursday, 8 May 2003Statements by the Chairman of the General Council and the Director-General
Chairman of the General Council
Good morning. I should like to thank you all for your presence here this morning and to welcome you warmly to this first consultation convened jointly by the Director-General, in his capacity as Chairman of the Trade Negotiations Committee, and myself as Chairman of the General Council. We hope to make this a useful instrument of progress on the path leading to Canc