Cato Daily Dispatch for November 13, 2001
France Threatens To Walk Out Of WTO TalksCompromise On Mexican Trucks Sought
Council of Europe Seeks To Censor Internet Speech
France Threatens To Walk Out Of WTO Talks
France threatened yesterday to walk away from negotiations to launch global trade talks over the volatile issue of farm export subsidies, despite two years of work by the World Trade Organization to recover from Seattle's embarrassing failure to hold talks, according to the Associated Press.
"Really it is a sort of deal-breaker point," said French Trade Minister Francois Huwart over demands by other nations for an agenda that would see a "phasing out" of the subsidies.
Huwart's comments to reporters came hours before the midnight deadline, after five days of talks among the WTO's 142 members on a declaration that would set out the road map for a new trade round.
In "Seattle and Beyond: A WTO Agenda for the New Millennium," trade experts Brink Lindsey, Daniel T. Griswold, Mark A. Groombridge, and Aaron Lukas outline a vision for a new trade round and recommend that the United States "should seek the global elimination of agricultural export subsidies, a drastic decline in domestic price supports, and a steep cut in trade barriers, especially the tariff spikes that protect certain favored farm sectors."
Compromise On Mexican Trucks Sought
Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) offered a compromise on new rules governing the safety of Mexican trucks in the United States, hoping to avoid President Bush's threatened veto of a $60 billion transportation bill, according to The Washington Post.
Todd Webster, a spokesman for Murray, said the plan softens requirements for insurance and safety inspections.
Due to safety concerns, trucks from Mexico are restricted to a commercial zone that generally runs up to 20 miles inside the U.S. border. Mexican President Vicente Fox has said that opening American roads to the trucks is key to U.S.-Mexican relations, and Bush has threatened to veto the transportation bill if it delays that.
In "House Vote Erects Roadblock to U.S.-Mexican Trade," Cato trade scholar Daniel T. Griswold writes that truck restrictions are "really an effort to protect the Teamsters union from competition and to protect American consumers and producers from lower prices."
Council of Europe Seeks To Censor Internet Speech
The 43-nation Council of Europe is trying to ban racist and hate speech from the Internet by adding a protocol, or side agreement, to its cybercrime convention, which was stamped for ratification on Thursday, according to The New York Times. The convention is scheduled to be ratified at a meeting in Budapest Nov. 23.
The protocol would add racist Web page content and hate speech over computer networks to the list of cybercrimes, the Council of Europe, a club of European democracies that aims to protect human rights, said.
The United States, which is a signatory to the convention, resisted European moves to include the issue of racist Web sites in the main agreement, because doing so would conflict with the free-speech protections in the First Amendment.
In "Web Restrictions Unlikely to Muzzle Neo-Nazi Speech," Director of Telecommunications Studies Adam D. Thierer explains that European efforts to sanitize the Internet "can never work -- at least not without creating an international police force to patrol the World Wide Web and punish any company whose networks might be used to transmit [racist messages]."
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