Robust, comprehensive and binding? -A critical analysis of selected environmental provisions in the chapter on trade and sustainable development of three EU Free Trade Agreements

Abstract

The recent proliferation of bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) inaugurated a new era of international trade policy which brought with it new chances for enhancing the trade and environment nexus. Judging from the increasing environmental content of those bilateral and regional FTAs, the latter appear to have enabled groups of countries to increase environmental cooperation and negotiate environmental commitments that go beyond what has been achieved within the WTO.
Since its 2006 Global Europe policy, the EU has adopted a fairly coherent approach of including in its FTAs entire chapters devoted to matters of trade and sustainable development (TSD Chapters) or trade and environment (TE Chapters). Ambitious statements have been made on the part of the EU about the stringency and power of these TSD/TE Chapters. As referred to in the title of this article, according to the Delegation of the EU to Vietnam, the TSD Chapter in the EUVFTA is ‘robust, comprehensive and binding’. The European Commission stated that CETA ‘has some of the strongest commitments ever included in a trade deal to promote […] environmental protection and sustainable development’, which are ‘binding, with the same legal value as any other provision.’ This article aims at testing the accuracy of these statements by making a detailed assessment of a selection of substantive environmental provisions contained in the TSD Chapter of the European Union–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement (EUJFTA) and the European Union-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EUVFTA) as well as in the TE Chapter of the European Union and Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).