📰 Brexit troubles
The British PM faces a tough test to win support in Europe for her Chequers plan
•Desperate times call for desperate measures. British Prime Minister Theresa May last week flew to France to meet French President Emmanuel Macron at his holiday home, to lobby for her Cabinet’s version of Brexit that emerged from a retreat at Chequers, her own country retreat, a few weeks ago. The proposal scraped through in the House of Commons. And having just about won the support of her own Tory party MPs, Ms. May and her Cabinet colleagues are now taking the show on the road, hoping to sell the plan to individual European leaders. It won’t be easy. Last week, Michel Barnier, the European Union’s chief negotiator, suggested in a newspaper article a softening of the EU’s position on the Irish “backstop” — a temporary customs arrangement to avoid a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, until a permanent solution is found. Both the EU and the U.K. are against a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, key to the Good Friday Agreement that has ensured peace on the island since 1998. However, beyond offering vague language on “regulatory alignment”, it is unclear how Britain proposes to achieve this while exiting the EU Customs Union and Single Market. The EU had proposed that Northern Ireland remain in a common regulatory area with the Republic of Ireland and the EU. This was rejected by London. Mr. Barnier wrote that the EU would be willing to “improve the text” of its proposal on the Irish border question.
•However, his article poured cold water on another core element of the Chequers plan: a post-Brexit free trade area between Britain and the EU for goods alone, leaving trade in services for a separate agreement. The U.K. and the EU would collect tariffs on goods on each other’s behalf where needed. Mr. Barnier pointed out that goods and services are often inextricably linked, and that the U.K. cannot expect to have free movement of goods without free movement of services, people and capital — the ‘four freedoms’ of being part of the European Single Market — nor, as an external party, expect to be allowed to collect customs duties on the EU’s behalf. The timing of Mr. Barnier’s comments, just as Ms. May was trying to win support on the continent, will throw a spanner in the works for her. Mr. Macron is one of Ms. May’s toughest Brexit customers, and is unlikely to present a divergent view from Brussels. France has a lot to gain from parts of the financial sector leaving the U.K. after Brexit. A Brexit deal must ideally be in place before a European summit in October; otherwise Britain is at risk of crashing out of the EU in March 2019.
📰 Clarifying asylum
The IACHR’s advisory opinion is a moral victory for Julian Assange, but will it impress the U.K. or the U.S.?
•June 19th was the sixth anniversary of WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange entering the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He was granted asylum in 2012 by then President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa. Mr. Correa’s successor, Lenin Moreno, has made his hostility to Mr. Assange clear, calling him a “hacker,” “stone in the shoe” and an “inherited problem,” among other things. Ecuador recently cut off Mr. Assange’s Internet access and has restricted phone calls and visitors, rendering him practically incommunicado. In contrast to the fierce anti-Americanism of Mr. Correa, Mr. Moreno is keen to normalise trade relations with the U.S. and attract foreign investment from American businesses.
•In 2012, to avoid being extradited to Sweden over sexual assault and rape allegations, Mr. Assange skipped bail and entered the Ecuadorean embassy, where he has since remained protected by diplomatic asylum status. While Swedish prosecutors have dropped their investigations, a U.K. judge refused to withdraw the arrest warrant, making it clear that Mr. Assange will be arrested on bail-jumping charges the moment he leaves the Ecuadorean embassy.
•In the meantime, there have been reports that Mr. Assange’s health has been deteriorating and that he is in urgent need of safe passage to a hospital, which, too, the U.K. has refused. It is against this backdrop that the advisory opinion from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), delivered on May 30 in San Jose, Costa Rica, assumes significance. The IACHR is an independent, multinational court that handles the human rights cases of people affected by the laws of countries that are members of the Organisation of American States (OAS).
•The IACHR, in response to a request from Ecuador, had given its view on “the institution of asylum and its recognition as a human right in the Inter-American system.” Citing provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights and the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, it considered whether the human right of the asylum-seeker covered both “territorial asylum and diplomatic asylum” and concluded that it did. Without naming Mr. Assange, it ruled that all nations have an obligation to ensure safe passage for asylum seekers to their final territory of asylum. This would mean that the U.K. has an obligation to allow safe passage for Mr. Assange to Ecuador, where he has been granted political asylum as well as citizenship.
•The advisory opinion, therefore, represents a moral victory for Mr. Assange in the context of the Moreno regime’s eagerness to get rid of “the stone in the shoe”. But unless the ruling leads to a build-up of stronger public opinion in favour of his safe passage to freedom, it is unlikely to either move the U.K. or impress the OAS member state that represents the biggest threat to Mr. Assange’s freedom: the U.S.
📰 Change gears: amendments to the Motor Vehicles Act
States should reconsider their opposition to amendments to the Motor Vehicles Act
•India’s law governing motor vehicles and transport is archaic, lacking the provisions necessary to manage fast motorisation. The lacunae in the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, require to be addressed to improve road safety, ensure orderly use of vehicles and expand public transport. The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Bill, passed by the Lok Sabha last year, seeks to do this, but it has now run into opposition in the Rajya Sabha because of its perceived shift of power from the States to the Centre. The issue is not one of legislative competence; as the subject is in the Concurrent List, Parliament can make a law defining powers available to the States. Some State governments are concerned about the new provisions, Sections 66A and 88A, which will empower the Centre to form a National Transportation Policy through a process of consultation, and not concurrence. The changes will also enable Centrally-drafted schemes to be issued for national, multi-modal and inter-State movement of goods and passengers, for rural mobility and even last-mile connectivity. Since all this represents a new paradigm that would shake up the sector, several States have opposed the provisions as being anti-federal. Doing nothing, however, is no longer an option. The passenger transport sector operating within cities and providing inter-city services has grown amorphously, with vested interests exploiting the lack of transparency and regulatory bottlenecks. With a transparent system, professional new entrants can enter the sector. As things stand, State-run services have not kept pace with the times. Major investments made in the urban metro rail systems are yielding poor results in the absence of last-mile connectivity services.
•Creating an equitable regulatory framework for the orderly growth of services is critical. This could be achieved through changes to the MV Act that set benchmarks for States. Enabling well-run bus services to operate across States with suitable permit charges is an imperative to meet the needs of a growing economy. Regulatory changes introduced in Europe over the past few years for bus services have fostered competition, reduced fares and increased services operating across European Union member-states. Other aspects of the proposed amendments deal with road safety. These, however, are likely to achieve little without strong enforcement by the States. The effort to curb institutionalised corruption at Regional Transport Offices by making it possible for dealers to directly register new vehicles, and enabling online applications for driving licences is welcome. Care is needed to see that other measures, such as sharply enhancing fines for rule violations, do not only result in greater harassment. It is the certainty of enforcement, zero tolerance and escalating penalties that will really work. There are some new provisions to harness technology, including CCTV monitoring, to improve road safety, but these cannot produce results when there is no professional accident investigation agency to determine best practices.
📰 Anatomy of an outbreak
The way Kerala has handled the Nipah virus outbreak holds crucial lessons for the rest of India.Priyanka Pullareports on how a deadly virus is being tackled byan alert administration
•At around 2 a.m. on May 17 morning, a grievously sick Mohammed Salih, a 28-year-old architect from Kerala’s Perambra town, was rushed by his family to Kozhikode’s Baby Memorial Hospital. Salih was vomiting, had a high fever, and was in a mentally agitated state. The doctor on call, critical care physician A.S. Anoop Kumar, knew these symptoms meant encephalitis, an inflammation of brain tissue that kills hundreds in India every year. Kumar tried to stabilise Salih, but by around 9 a.m., when the hospital’s neurologists came to examine him, it was obvious that something was very wrong.
•Even though Salih was receiving top-end care, his condition was worsening rapidly. He had some very peculiar symptoms, recalls Chellenton Jayakrishnan, one of the neurologists who treated him. His heart was racing at over 180 beats per minute and his blood pressure had shot up. His limbs were limp, displaying no reflexes. These symptoms were unlike any encephalitis cases that the team had ever seen. Jayakrishnan and his colleagues ruled out, one by one, dozens of common causes of encephalitis. Salih couldn’t have Japanese encephalitis. The mosquito-borne infection typically doesn’t affect more than one person in a household, and his younger brother, Sabith, had died about 12 days ago after showing similar symptoms. His father and aunt, too, had contracted the infection.
•Rabies, another possible cause of encephalitis, was ruled out too. “If the family had been exposed through a common pet, they would have fallen sick at the same time,” says Jayakrishnan. Salih had fallen sick days after Sabith did. So, was this a case of poisoning? The team ruled this out, too. Toxins could trigger encephalitis-like symptoms but were usually not accompanied by fever.
•The neurologists knew by then that they were looking at an exotic virus, possibly never seen in Kerala before. Anoop Kumar decided to call for help. He turned to virologist Govindakarnavar Arunkumar at Karnataka’s Manipal Centre for Virus Research (MCVR), about 300 km from Kozhikode. Salih’s samples were dispatched to MCVR.
•Forty-seven-year-old Arunkumar has investigated several mystery outbreaks of encephalitis in the past. In 2015, his team found a recurrent epidemic in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur to be Scrub Typhus, a diagnosis that was later confirmed by other researchers. A year later, he joined hands with virologist T. Jacob John to uncover the etiology of an encephalitis-like syndrome in Odisha’s Malkangiri district. For four years now, Arunkumar has been heading a surveillance project which tests patients with fever in 10 States for over 40 pathogens. As part of this project, MCVR upgraded one of its labs to Biosafety Level 3 two years ago, so they could work with highly lethal pathogens like the Kyasanur Forest Disease virus. This upgrade gave Arunkumar the chance to expand his testing repertoire. And the pathogen he was eyeing was the deadly Nipah virus.
A serendipitous diagnosis
•The Nipah virus made its first documented appearance in Malaysia in 1998. There, the virus is believed to have jumped from fruit bats of the Pteropus species to domestic pigs paddocked under the trees where such bats roost. From the pigs, the virus travelled to pig breeders, infecting and killing about 105 of them in an outbreak. Nipah next appeared in Bangladesh, triggering nearly 15 outbreaks in the 2000s. The pathogen had a different modus operandi in that country. It mainly infected people who had a taste for raw palm sap, which is frequently contaminated by bat urine and saliva. Once the virus spread to humans, it was transmitted from one person to another through respiratory droplets, a feature that wasn’t seen in Malaysia.
•Nipah killed nearly 70% of those it infected in Bangladesh, compared to 40% in Malaysia. During the epidemic years in Bangladesh, the virus also crossed the border to enter West Bengal — twice. The outbreaks occurred in 2001 and 2007 in the districts of Siliguri and Nadia, killing 70 people.
•Arunkumar was interested in testing for Nipah for two reasons. First, among the States covered by his surveillance project were Tripura and Assam, both across the border from Bangladesh and potential geographies for Nipah. Second, the virus is thought to be a probable bioterrorism agent. So, in August 2017, the MCVR team was trained by the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to test for the Nipah virus. This made the Manipal laboratory only the second facility in India capable of doing so, apart from Pune’s National Institute of Virology (NIV). It was a serendipitous move.
•When Arunkumar received Salih’s samples on May 18, he also ruled out common causes of encephalitis such as the Japanese encephalitis virus, the Herpes Simplex virus and Leptospira bacteria. Only one pathogen seemed capable of causing Salih’s symptoms and leading to sickness among several family members at the same time. “It was Nipah,” says Arunkumar.
•Meanwhile, doctors at Baby Memorial had also come to the same conclusion. Nipah had crossed Jayakrishnan’s mind on the first day. By the second day, the team had browsed through medical journals and found that Salih’s symptoms closely matched those of the patients affected in the 1998 Malaysian outbreak. Arunkumar ran the samples through a diagnostic test called Real Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR), which detects viral genetic material. Salih, his father V.K. Moosa, and his maternal aunt Mariyam Kandoth all tested positive for Nipah.
•As this story went to print, Nipah had claimed the lives of 17 of the 19 people it had infected in Kozhikode, a mortality rate of 89%. The outbreak triggered widespread panic, with families in Perambra deserting their homes en masse. As speculation grew about how the virus was transmitted, N-95 masks appeared all over Kozhikode. When officials announced that the virus could spread through fruits that were half-eaten by bats, people cut down on their fruit purchases.
•But without the prompt diagnosis, it could have been worse. In Bangladesh, the first few outbreaks killed dozens in the districts of Meherpur and Naogaon, but were not recognised as Nipah until after they ended. In the 2001 Siliguri outbreak, investigators figured out that it was the Nipah virus that was infecting people only six months later. By then, 60 people had been infected and 45 had died.
•India has a poor record of outbreak investigations. About 10,000 people develop encephalitis-like symptoms each year but never get a diagnosis. Some regions, such as Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur and Bihar’s Muzaffarpur, saw thousands of deaths in repeated annual outbreaks before the causes were established. Against this background, the discovery of an exotic pathogen in the very second patient hit by an outbreak, as was the case in Kozhikode, has few precedents.
A brisk State response
•Once MCVR had pinpointed the Nipah virus, they had to move quickly. Under the 2005 International Health Regulations, India is obligated to report outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases to the World Health Organisation. The MCVR team had to therefore be doubly sure of its findings. The only way to be so was to ask NIV, Pune, to run Nipah diagnostic tests on a second set of the Perambra family’s samples. As they waited for NIV’s confirmation, Arunkumar told the Baby Memorial doctors that they were dealing with a deadly new virus, and that suspected patients should be isolated immediately. “But we didn’t release the name,” says Arunkumar. Revealing the name publicly would require NIV’s verification, which only came on May 20.
•But the State health-care machinery did not wait for confirmation. Within hours of Salih’s arrival at Baby Memorial, Kozhikode’s district medical officer, V. Jayashree, had learnt of it. She put together a team of entomologists and visited Salih’s Perambra home on the morning of May 18. They collected mosquito samples and fogged the area, just in case the mosquitoes were the disease vectors.
•By the time Arunkumar shared the final results on May 20, State medical associations and government doctors were already on high alert. The State’s Health Minister, K.K. Shylaja, was in the city to oversee the outbreak response. It was easy to move ahead at this point. On May 20 morning, an officer trained in Ebola outbreak protocols instructed the State’s doctors in infection-control measures — isolating patients, using surgical masks and decontaminating surfaces. It was an extraordinarily swift response by any measure. Yet, according to the State’s Director of Health Services, R.L. Saritha, this was routine procedure. “There were two cases of encephalitis. We wanted to prevent the third. This is the usual response in Kerala to all outbreaks,” she says.
Two waves slip through
•For all of the Kerala government’s agility in tackling Nipah, the virus proved to be a formidable adversary. When Salih contracted the infection from his younger brother, so did several others. This was the first wave of infection, and Sabith was patient zero — the first to fall sick.
•By all accounts, Sabith was a well liked 26-year-old. A plumber by profession, he loved children and animals, says his cousin Jabir. Today, a colony of rabbits sit in a cage in the family’s abandoned Perambra home. They are fed by the neighbours.
•Some time on May 3, Sabith grew feverish. His family took him to the Perambra Taluk Hospital, where his condition worsened quickly. On May 5, when he began to lose consciousness, the family shifted him to the Kozhikode Medical College. Later in the night, Sabith died. But during his stay in Perambra Taluk Hospital and the medical college, nurses attended to him, and dozens of neighbours came to look him up.
•Such close contact with patient zero led to seven new cases in Perambra Taluk Hospital and 10 in Kozhikode Medical College. Meanwhile, one of the patients infected in the first wave at Perambra went on to get admitted at the Balussery Taluk Hospital on May 17. He infected yet another person, raising the possibility of a second wave of infection at the Balussery hospital. Nipah spreads mainly through respiratory droplets, and sicker patients secrete more virus. It was only in Baby Memorial, which had stricter infection-control protocols, that transmission seems to have stopped.
•While State authorities prepare for a second wave of infection, with the Balussery transmission coming to light only on May 31, Arunkumar believes that this wave may not be a large one. For one, infection-control measures were put in place by the 20th, and over 1,400 people who came in contact with the 19 confirmed cases are being closely watched. For another, unlike other viruses like measles in the Paramyxovirus family to which Nipah belongs, Nipah does not spread efficiently and moves only to people within a metre of very sick patients.
•This pattern of transmission is typical of how Nipah spread in Bangladesh and West Bengal. In the 2001 Siliguri outbreak, the first wave occurred in the Siliguri District Hospital, where patient zero infected nine others, including five staff members. Two of the patients then joined two other nursing homes, where they spread the illness to 34 others. In contrast to Siliguri, where hospital attendants formed the bulk of the patients, Bangladeshi Nipah cases were mostly related to other patients. A 2009 study in Clinical Infectious Diseasesnoted that Bangladeshi nurses had less physical contact with patients, as compared to western hospitals. Instead, family members provided hands-on care. Cultural practices like sharing of beds and utensils with patients exacerbated the risk to families, the researchers noted.
•In Kerala, the number of confirmed new cases emerging each day has slowed after the first wave from patient zero. But as the Nipah virus can incubate in the body for up to 21 days, health officials cannot take it easy for a while. Only when 42 days, or two incubation periods, pass after the last confirmed case will the State be declared Nipah-free.
•The Kerala government’s extraordinary response is, unfortunately, no solace for Salih’s family. Within a span of three weeks, they have lost four members. In the verandah of a neat two-storied house in Perambra, Salih’s uncle, Haji Moidu, sits staring ahead. His family and friends have gathered around him to mourn the loss of his wife Mariyam, brother Moosa, and nephews. Soon after Salih’s death, his aunt and father also succumbed to Nipah.
•But even before the family could come to terms with the deaths, several media outlets had published false information about the victims. A local daily wrote that Sabith had travelled to Malaysia, acquiring the Nipah virus there. The family is furious. “They have attempted to isolate us,” they say, showing Sabith’s passport. The only foreign nation Sabith visited was the United Arab Emirates, in search for a job.
Trapping the suspects
•The question of how Sabith contracted the virus remains a mystery, given that the only other Indian outbreaks have happened in West Bengal. But the strongest suspects now are Kozhikode’s large fruit bat populations. The species were found to be carriers of the Nipah virus in both Malaysia and Bangladesh.
•This is also why two teams of researchers from NIV are currently camping in Kozhikode to collect samples from fruit bats. It’s going to be an uphill task. For one, experiments have shown that the Nipah virus circulates within bats for brief periods of time, during which the likelihood of transmission to humans, or a “spillover” event, increases. In a 2011 study published in the AmericanJournal of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine , virologists experimentally infected fruit bats from Malaysia and Australia with the Nipah virus, and the closely related Hendra virus. When they tried to isolate the pathogen from the bats only a few days later, they were unable to do so in most cases.
•“It’s very challenging to find the virus in bats, even when you are looking in a known reservoir, and that’s because of the nature of the infection,” says Jonathan Epstein, an epidemiologist with the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance and an author of the study. According to Epstein, the Nipah infection doesn’t last for very long in bats. “Unless your timing is good, and you are collecting samples close to when the first case was exposed, your chances diminish,” he explains.
•Sabith fell sick on May 3, and it is possible that the virus is undetectable in Perambra’s fruit bats now. However, the mammals may still be carrying antibodies to the Nipah virus, which remain for longer. But it isn’t clear if NIV will test for antibodies, in addition to the viral genes. In an email to The Hindu , NIV director D.T. Mourya said the group’s front line test would be RT-PCR, which only detects viral genes. Unless the NIV researchers are able to find a large number of bats, they may not have enough blood and urine samples to look for antibodies.
•To make matters more difficult, trapping bats is a tough job. The Indian flying fox can weigh over a kilogram, with a wingspan of up to five feet. The team’s strategy will be to raise large nets on 60-feet high poles, so that bats unseeingly fly into them. Meanwhile, the district animal husbandry department will collect bat droppings and urine from the ground. This, too, is becoming harder as monsoon hits Kerala. “Collecting bat droppings is not easy when it is raining. The quantity of urine is only 0.5 ml per animal,” says A.C. Mohandas, the district animal husbandry officer at Kozhikode. Without enough samples, we may never know how Nipah travelled to Kerala.
•Even if fruit bats are eventually found to be the source of Nipah, it may not be easy to establish how Sabith came in contact with them. Early interviews with his family had revealed that he and his brother had supervised the cleaning of a bat-infested well near his house. However, when animal husbandry officials checked the well, they were only able to collect a single bat from an insectivorous species. This sample turned out negative for Nipah. Another explanation could be that Sabith unwittingly ate a fruit contaminated with bat saliva. If this was the route of exposure, it’s doubtful it will be confirmed. But exposure through bitten fruits is not unlikely.
•At Sabith’s Perambra home, three neighbours, all undergraduate students, stop by to chat. They had known Sabith’s family and were shocked by the swiftness with which his family succumbed. The conversation drifts to how Sabith may have contracted the virus. One of them says, “We used to consume half-eaten guavas and mangoes all the time. We would just remove the bitten part and eat the rest. Nothing ever happened to us.” I ask them if they continue to do so. “No,” he says. “We are too scared now.”
📰 The problem at the WTO
The time has come for the developing world to have a greater say
•While Bretton Woods institutions were to embed the new financial trade order, U.S. Treasury department official, Harry Dexter White, and economist John Maynard Keynes had more than just the regulation of the international monetary system in mind at the time. An International Trade Organisation (ITO) was also to be created to establish multilateral rules for the settlement of trade disputes. Adherence to the rules of an international trade organisation was expected to serve as an important domestic incentive (and imperative) for governments by allowing them to resist protectionist demands and provide for greater legal certainty. Successive multilateral conferences were held between 1946 and 1948, and led to the adoption of the Havana Charter, a draft agreement for the creation of the ITO. But the ITO never came into existence as it was eventually rejected by the U.S. when, in 1950, President Harry Truman announced that he would not submit the Havana Charter to the Congress. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) came to replace the ITO, interestingly as an ad hoc and provisional mechanism.
The U.S.’s ire
•Four decades later, the U.S. drove the agenda to establish the World Trade Organisation (WTO) purely to pursue its own commercial interests. The U.S. has been long proven isolationist and has never truly embraced the idea of a multilateral system in which its leadership could be contested. So the recent ire against its very creations, from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the less recent disenchantment with NATO or UNESCO, is not surprising.
•A closer look at the Doha round of trade negotiations shows that the U.S. may well have consciously (or not) destroyed the negotiation process in formulating excessive demands that no country was prepared to meet. After all, the priority of the Obama administration was not to revive a dying WTO negotiation, but to concentrate on its newly created alternative, the TPP, to contain its competitors: Europe and China. So much so that the current crisis with the WTO dispute settlement system does not come as a surprise. In trade wars, the objective is not to settle a dispute; it is to win the battle.
The dispute settlement crisis
•For years now, the multilateral system for the settlement of trade dispute has been under intense scrutiny and constant criticism. The U.S. has systematically blocked the appointment of new Appellate Body members (“judges”) and de facto impeded the work of the WTO appeal mechanism. With only four working members out of seven normally serving office in July 2018, the institution is under great stress. If no appointment is made, it will simply be destroyed by December 2019, with only one remaining member to tackle a massive number of disputes that are also increasingly hypertechnical. Importantly, the Appellate Body requires a core of three members to decide a dispute.
•Criticism against the dispute settlement system is not the monopoly of the U.S. Other WTO members are expressing concerns over the politicisation of the Appellate Body appointment and reappointment process; and the quasi-attribution of permanent Appellate Body seats to the U.S. and the European Union (EU). There is concern that China may be on its way to having a permanent seat.
•But the main critique of the U.S. relates to “overreaching” or judicial activism. The WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding stresses that the dispute panels cannot “add to or diminish the rights and obligations” provided for by the WTO agreements. The U.S. has relentlessly attacked the practice of some Appellate Body members continuing to hear cases which have been assigned to them during their tenure. However, the U.S. has to be blamed for this situation. With no fresh filling up of vacancies and reappointment of members whose terms are expiring, Washington is deliberately pushing the WTO legal mechanism to the brink. It is more than evident that the U.S. is not willing to be judged by an independent multilateral quasi-judicial institution. One needs to bear in mind that the WTO dispute settlement mechanism is not a world trade court. The process remains political and diplomatic. The very existence of an appeal mechanism is now paradoxically questioned at a time the global community criticises the absence of the same mechanism in Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). Solutions are proposed to ease the work of a congested body from the establishment of committees to arbitration, but the roots of the problems are not seriously addressed.
Who could be WTO’s saviour?
•Since 2013, a Chinese-style garden welcomes the visitor to the WTO. As always with China, the metaphor illustrates a profound reality and is not short of pragmatism. Beijing might well be the new WTO leader and China’s growing assertiveness may be the reason for the U.S.’s hard posturing. Since its accession to the Organisation, in 2001, and despite an extremely demanding protocol of accession designed by the U.S. and the EU to literally constrain its emerging power and limit the impact of its commercial domination on their own economies, China has largely benefited from the rules-based WTO system. In less than a decade since its first dispute, China has accumulated a vast experience close to that of the U.S. or Europe. This strategic and selective normative acculturation has been an empowering one — so much so that Beijing, together with a few others, the EU, and to some extent India, is now the main supporter of multilateralism. But does an undemocratic and statist China hold the legitimacy to take the lead while its genuine adhesion to the market economy is very much challenged by its main trading partners? The recent EU-China proposal to promote the reform of the WTO is said to combat “unilateralism and protectionism” but might well fail to address unfair trade issues raised against China itself. Beijing is unlikely to unite with Brussels against Washington.
•But the world has changed and multilateral institutions now have to embed these changes. Today’s WTO crisis might well be the last ditch battle to retain control over a Western-centric organisation. The time has come for the emerging economies and the developing world to have a greater say in how to shape multilateralism and its institutions.
📰 ‘Amendments will dilute RTI Act’
Srikrishna panel did not consult CIC: Acharyulu
•Corrupt government officials will be able to escape public scrutiny if the Right to Information Act, 2005 is amended according to the recommendations of the Justice Srikrishna committee on data protection, Central Information Commissioner M. Sridhar Acharyulu has warned.
•In a letter to Chief Information Commissioner R.K. Mathur and his five fellow Commissioners, Professor Acharyulu warned that if the amendments are made, “The Right to Information Act will be rendered absolutely useless in securing access to public records pertaining to public servants.”
•Terming the amendments as unconstitutional, he noted that the Justice Srikrishna panel had not consulted the Central Information Commission before making its recommendations.
‘New threat’
•He suggested that the Commissioners meet to “consider this new threat ... and take a stand to oppose it at this stage itself.” The Hindu has seen a copy of the letter, which is dated 2nd August 2018.
•The Justice Srikrishna panel’s draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 proposes to amend Section 8 of the RTI Act, which allows certain types of information to be exempted from disclosure. This includes “information which relates to personal information the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or interest, which would cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual unless the Central Public Information Officer or the State Public Information Officer or the appellate authority, as the case may be, is satisfied that the larger public interest justifies the disclosure of such information.”
•The proposed amendment would instead exempt “information which relates to personal data which is likely to cause harm to a data principal, where such harm outweighs the public interest in accessing such information having due regard to the common good of promoting transparency and accountability in the functioning of the public authority.”
•If amended, the Section would “expand scope of denial of information with several ambiguous and very wide expressions,” warned Prof. Acharyulu, pointing out that the Bill contains no definitions for “common good”, “promotion”, “transparency”, or even “privacy.”
•However, he felt that the most dangerous term was “harm”, which is defined in 10 different ways, including “mental injury”, “loss of reputation, or humiliation” and “any subjection to blackmail or extortion”. Any of these could be used to reject information, as even embarrassment could be considered as “mental injury”, he said.
📰 U.S.-China trade war can make Indian products competitive, says CII report
‘India must focus on U.S. market for machinery, plastics, rubber products’
•With the U.S. imposing an additional 25% duty on imports worth $34 billion from China, certain Indian products may become more competitive, the CII said.
•An analysis by the industry chamber revealed that India should focus on the U.S. market for items in the categories of machinery, electrical equipment, vehicles and transport parts, chemicals, plastics and rubber products.
Tariffs increased
•India can focus on several goods for expanding its exports to the U.S. and China after the increase in duties by both countries on imports from each other. Top exports from India to the U.S. which are covered in the list of items for which the tariffs have been raised include pumps, parts of military aircraft, parts for electro-diagnostic apparatus, passenger vehicles of 1500-3000 cc, valve bodies and parts of taps.
•Exports of these items stood at more than $50 million in 2017, according to CII, and can be increased with concerted efforts. Countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have increased their exports of these products to the U.S. in recent years, it noted.
•Based on India’s current exports to the U.S. in these categories, products such as intermediate parts for the defence and aerospace sector, vehicles and auto parts, engineering goods, etc. have higher potential for export.
•“Sectors like apparel and textiles, footwear, toys and games and cell phone manufacturing are becoming competitive industries in India and need to be encouraged,” CII said. It suggested that trade talks with the U.S. be strategised taking into account India’s competitive advantage in these products.
📰 Scheme for girl child launched
•Amid a barrage of attacks over the Muzaffarpur sex scandal, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has launched an ambitious scheme which promises to provide Rs. 54,100 from the birth of a girl child till she graduates.
•Mr. Kumar launched the ‘Mukhyamantri Kanya Utthan Yojana’ here on Friday and expressed his government’s resolve for empowerment of women. In his speech, Mr. Kumar talked about his happiness over the start of the scheme, but at the same time said he was “standing here with mixed feelings” over the case of sex abuse at a State-funded girls’ shelter home at Muzaffarpur.
•The Chief Minister also made several other announcements like increasing the amount under the ‘Bicycle Yojna’ from Rs. 2500 to Rs. 3000.
•The scheme, launched by the Nitish Kumar government in 2006, providing bicycles to school going girls, has won laurels. Mr. Kumar also announced doubling of amount for purchase of sanitary napkins to Rs. 300 from existing Rs. 150 under the ‘Kishori Swasthya Yojna.’
•The ‘Mukhyamantri Kanya Utthan Yojana’ will be run by three departments — education, health and social welfare.
