A Dummy's Guide to Article 133

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday September 24, 2002 20:38 by Graham Caswell caswell at indigo dot ie

The Dark Secret at the Heart of the Nice Treaty

This is the first half of an introductory article I am writing about article 133, GATS and the Nice Treaty. It's pretty inpenetrable stuff, and the going is slow, so here's the first installment.....

It's very name makes the eyes glaze over with boredom. For a start, how exciting can any 'article' be? And the number of Article 133 suggests a lot of other articles somewhere. You'd suspect that the document that includes article 133 is very long and very boring - and you'd be right. The Consolidated Version of the Treaty on European Union (the closest thing that the EU has to a constitution) has a total of 314 articles. You'd have to be some kind of bureaucratic Euro-geek to have even heard of article 133 - the kind of person who should get out more. Either that or you'd have to be paid a lot of money to get interested in it - like the people who wrote it in the first place were. But it's a pity that article 133 so boring and that so few people are interested in it because, if the second referendum on the Nice Treaty succeeds, it could have a huge effect on your life.

Article 133 started life in the Treaty of Rome that kicked off the European Union in the first place (back in those days it was called article 113). It established a special committee of civil servants to co-ordinate trade policy among the EU members (or EEC members, as they were then called). The intention was that member states would have a 'common commercial policy' and thus present a united front in international trade negotiations.

Following the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty (which turned article 113 into article 133) this committee became unimaginatively known as the '133 Committee'. It is made up of a civil servant appointed by the government of each member state who usually meet once a month (Ireland's rep is Tony Joyce, Principal Officer at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, email Tony_Joyce@entemp.ie). 133 committee members also have deputies who meet every week and there are sub-committees for specialist areas such as services, textiles and motor vehicles.

The 133 committee makes important decisions about all kinds of international trade issues such as the banana dispute, the response to the American levy on European steel and WTO negotiations. Some of their decisions are ratified by the Council by qualified majority and some are approved directly by civil servants from the member states. However the Council of Europe makes it impossible to get any detailed information about the activities of the 133 committee because "confidentiality must be maintained, in particular with regard to commercial and industrial matters". MEPs have submitted written questions to the Council of Europe about the 133 committee but little information has been forthcoming. Very few people know what happens at these 133 committee meetings.

In 1997 the Amsterdam Treaty expanded the powers of the 133 Committee to cover "international negotiations and agreements on services and intellectual property" and stated that the EU's common commercial policy would be based on uniform principles, "particularly in regard to changes in tariff rates, the conclusion of tariff and trade agreements, the achievement of uniformity in measures of liberalisation, export policy and measures to protect trade such as those to be taken in the event of dumping or subsidies". Essentially this means what the Council of Europe, through a qualified majority, says it means. However it is reasonably clear that "liberalisation" means privatisation and deregulation. "The achievement of uniformity in measures of liberalisation" means that individual EU member states must privatise and deregulate in line with the rest. This has been passed and is now part of EU law. It's what prevents the government from granting state aid to Aer Lingus or An Post.

Today, in the Nice Treaty on which we are being asked to vote, there is an attempt to further expand the powers of article 133 and Committee 133. In particular there is an extension of these powers to apply to the negotiation of "trade in services and the commercial aspects of intellectual property". Another clause expands this to cover all aspects of intellectual property) while cultural, educational, social and health services are excluded.

These revisions to article 133 of the Treaty of Nice are specifically designed to facilitate the participation of the 133 committee in ongoing WTO negotiations towards a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The 133 committee, with the backing of the Council of Europe acting by qualified majority, will represent the people of the European Union in the GATS negotiations and, with the exception of cultural, educational, social and health services, the results of their negotiations will be binding on all nations of the EU, including Ireland.

Key Point: The expansion of powers in Article 133 of the Nice Treaty are specifically designed to facilitate EU participation in GATS

A user-friendly introduction to GATS and the privatisation and deregulation it will bring to a country near you can be found at http://www.tni.org/reports/wto/wto4.pdf (PDF File)