17 Dec Chinese Internet Filtering WTO Challenge Gaining Momentum
This story from The Guardian is a wonderful development:
A California free speech group whose board of directors includes Google and Yahoo said on Monday it had asked U.S. trade officials to challenge China’s Internet restrictions as a violation of global trade rules. The issue threatens to further strain U.S.-China trade relations if the U.S. Trade Representative’s office decides to take on the case. With China already the world’s second-largest Internet market with over 162 million Web users, the commercial stakes are huge. “China’s censorship of the Internet, while fundamentally an issue of free speech and individual liberty, is also a significant barrier to U.S.-China commerce, and therefore, very much a trade issue,” Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, said in a statement that came as top U.S. officials were in Beijing for economic talks. In infringing the rights of its 1.2 billion citizens, China is also infringing the rights of American companies to sell goods and services to consumers in China, via the Internet,” he said. Internet giants Google and Yahoo have seats on the coalition’s board of directors, but the bulk of the public interest group’s members are West Coast newspapers and other traditional media companies, Scheer said in an interview…. The case relies on a legal theory developed by Columbia University Law Professor Timothy Wu, who argued in a law review article last year that WTO agreements on goods and services could be used to challenge government censorship of the Internet.
You can read Tim Wu’s article here. Congrats to Wu for his brilliant idea, which I have written about before here. As I said then, “I hope this draws the attention of USTR, as it is an interesting way to think about challenging the practice of Internet filtering.” Now that business interests and First Amendment advocates have joined forces, the chances that USTR will force the issue with China, potentially with WTO litigation, should increase dramatically.
Who would have thought that the WTO could be used as such a potent vehicle to challenge human rights abuses? The typical debate about international trade normally puts trade on one side of the ledger and human rights on the other. But this case uses international trade rules to promote civil liberties. Any Internet restrictions on religious, political, or commercial speech that serve as a barrier to the sale of goods and services in China have the potential to violate WTO obligations.
“Who would have thought that the WTO could be used as such a potent vehicle to challenge human rights abuses?”
Well, I did, taking my cue Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, among others. This was one topic in my debate with Professor Romano (in the context of the wisdom, or folly, of admitting Vietnam to the WTO) when he was guest blogging here at Opinio Juris not too long ago.
Some book titles relevant to this discussion:
Aaronson, Susan Ariel and Jamie M. Zimmerman. Trade Imbalance: The Struggle to Weigh Human Rights Concerns in Trade Policymaking. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Alston, Philip and Mary Robinson, eds. Human Rights and Development: Towards Mutual Reinforcement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Cottier, Thomas, Joost Pauwelyn, and Elisabeth Bürgi, eds. Human Rights and International Trade. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Harrison, James. The Human Rights Impact of the World Trade Organisation. Oxford, UK: Hart, 2007.
Hestermeyer, Holger P. Human Rights and the WTO: The Case of Patents and Access to Medicines. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.