What Goes Around Comes Around: How UNCLOS Ratification Will Herald Europe’s Precautionary Principle as U.S. Law

Summary: The congressional hearings on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) thus far convened by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations/SFRC make a mockery of the US Senate’s constitutional ‘advise and consent’ responsibility and offend Americans’ constitutional ‘right-to-know’ about matters that are likely to adversely affect their constitutional rights and economic lives and to impair US national sovereignty. The purpose of this article is to prompt the United States Congress to hold open, transparent and substantive public hearings to discuss, evaluate and explain to the American people the significant environmental regulatory and judicial enforcement aspects of the UNCLOS before that treaty is submitted to the full Senate for a vote of accession.

“Ecosystem-Based Management”: A Stealth Vehicle to Inject Euro-Style Precaution into U.S. Regulation

Summary: As debate continues over whether the US will accede to the UNCLOS, Congress and the Executive Branch are quietly working to inject UNCLOS environmental principles into U.S. law. Arguably, U.S. UNCLOS accession would explicitly embed Europe’s Precautionary Principle into the U.S. legal system at severe cost to the U.S. economy and national security.

A Chill Wind for Precaution?: Broader Ramifications of Supreme Court’s Winter Decision

Vol. 24 No. 6

Effort to Expand ‘Authentic Acts’ in Europe Imperils Economic Freedom

Summary: This article identifies how France is working to export the main tenets of its civil law system of preventive justice throughout global commerce to ‘change’ international law and the Anglo-American free enterprise system.

Edited by C. Sri Krishna

The Extra-WTO Precautionary Principle: One European 'Fashion' Export the United States Can Do Without

Summary: Certain American politicians have quietly worked with European governments to 'change' America ’s Regulatory Landscape at the state and local levels. This places America's individual rights-based federal system and Americans' constitutionally guaranteed exclusive private property rights at risk.

Vol. 2, No. 8

Race for the Arctic - At Issue: Should the U.S. Senate Ratify the UNCLOS?

Summary: ITSSD CEO Participates in point/counterpoint face-off with US Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski over whether the US should ratify the UNCLOS at the present time without holding any open and transparent substantive public hearings to investigate the UNCLOS' extensive environmental regulatory framework.

Vol. II, Issue 3

By Francis Tanczos

Summary: Since China's accession to the WTO, trade relations between the US and China have become visibly more tense. While the US insists on treating China as a non-market economy, China continues to engage in unfair dumping of low-cost goods, which has a negative effect on US producers. The US has responded by imposing some disguised trade barriers. However, how the issue of dumping is handled has serious implications for the future of US-Chinese trade relations.

Summary: Common bases in Russian and US history have triggered new thinking in Russia about how to use privately owned patent rights and cooperative government-university-industry technology transfer arrangements to secure successful market commercialization and peaceful adaptation of publicly-owned bio-warfare technologies. The American experience in innovation and intellectual property (patents and trade secrets) may thus be advantageous to use in Russia.

Summary: US LOST ratification would signal our acceptance of long-established customary international freedom of navigation principles, as the US Navy and Coast Guard have asserted. However, the general rule of “freedom of navigation/innocent passage” which the administration relies upon as the chief justification for binding America to this treaty has, over time, been eroded and diminished in scope by the LOST’s more numerous environmental regulatory exceptions.

(Kluwer Law Int’l)

Summary: This article details how the EU and its member states previously enlisted private regional environmental standards bodies to promote official government sustainable forest management policies that likely violated the WTO rights of developing countries and their industries. It also describes how these same EU governments are behind the ongoing efforts of other regional pressure groups to promote, thru UN agencies and international standardization organizations, the adoption of overly strict & expensive corporate social responsibility standards by global industry supply chains.

Response to Rebuttals

Two related articles appearing in Washington, DC and Porto Alegre, Brazil review the multiple bases offered by the Brazilian government for its illegal ‘taking’ of the American HIV/AIDS drug Efavirenz at less than ‘fair’ compensation.

The EU REACH regulatory regime is blatantly extra-territorial, violates national sovereignty and will soon be Imposed on industry up and down global product/process supply chains. Thus it is in the economic, legal and political interests of non-European companies, especially those based in developing countries and within the US, to challenge it at the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Summary:

The WTO Panel decision, in the EC Biotech Products case, reaffirmed that scientific risk assessment rather than political hazard profiling is the definitive WTO benchmark for health and environmental regulation purposes. It also validated the prudent long-term U.S. strategy of remaining outside UN environmental treaties favored by Europe.

Summary:

The total cost of employing a worker in France is so high that it constrains business and job growth, badly needed company investments and entrepreneurial risk-taking. Unless some level of free market reform is permitted to take place, France is unlikely "to revive its flagging growth and competitiveness". Private property ownership and self-help, rather than dialogue and government-imposed regulation, is what will best protect Frenchemployee interests.

         Ducking the Truth (Website Edition)