Monitoring Sustainability of Globalisation successfully organised a civil society briefing on Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) on 30 March 2019.
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a mega multilateral trade agreement established by 10 ASEAN countries and its 6 free trade agreement partners -- China, South Korea, Japan, India, Australia and New Zealand, in 2012.
The ambitious trade agreement will cover half of the population in the world and thirty percent of the global GDP, approximately US$25.4 trillion. 9 out of the 16 RCEP participating countries did not join Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for the TPP (CPTPP), for instance Thailand, China, India and Philippines.
So far, the involved countries have complete 24 round of negotiations, the 25th round of negotiation will be held in mid-February in Indonesia. Since the historic regime change in the GE14, the sixth Prime Minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad said the new government would conduct a comprehensive study on the pros and cons of free trade agreements.
The proposed RCEP continually draw flaks from ASEAN civil society. A leaked negotiating document shows that Japan and South Korea are pushing for high Intellectual Property Rights standards that could result in the rising of medicine price in ASEAN countries.
Farmer organisations also criticized RCEP provisions that require countries to comply with the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV 91), which prohibits farmers to use privatized seeds for the purpose of subsistence agriculture.
Just like other free trade agreements, RCEP contains investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, giving transnational corporation special privileges to unilaterally sue the state in a private tribunal. The ISDS mechanism challenges state sovereignty by emasculating the judicial system as a democratic institution mandated by the people.
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