Free trade treaties threatening access to low cost drugs and social services by persons living in conditions of poverty. Recommendation to conduct a study of the impact of trade standards on right to health and of the implementation of flexibility clauses in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property of the World Trade Organization.
The free trade agreement is still being negotiated. Several civil society organizations have started a campaign requesting the Government of Ecuador to subject the country’s execution of the agreement to a referendum (see Centro de Derechos Económicos y Sociales, Ecuador, Te lo contaron? No. 24 Boletín de Información para la Acción, available at http://www.cdes.org.ec/boblioteca/boletines/boletines-tlc/24.pdf and attached).
In the same session, the Committee on the Rights of the Child issued similar recommendations for Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Filipinas. These countries plan to ratify or have already started negotiating or ratifying free trade treaties. It is worth emphasizing that the UN Committees on Human Rights have started to include among their reasons for concern the impact of free trade treaties on economic, social and cultural rights. Although their final recommendations are not binding upon States, they are a valuable tool to be used at the domestic level in wider campaigns opposing the execution of such agreements.