Updates on TTIP
At the Council of Members and Extraordinary General Assembly in Bratislava last year, OBESSU amended its Political Platform and included a part about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, better known as TTIP. The Political Platform now demands “Education to be completely excluded from the agreement” and since COMEM/ExGA OBESSU has been working on the topic in several ways.
OBESSU gave its input to the position paper of EUCIS-LLL, a paper which now takes a similar position, and which has also taken onboard the views of other European-level education organisation. (We wrote about this in an article last year.)
On the 26th February, OBESSU Secretary General Rasmus Åberg went to a meeting hosted by Social Platform, bringing up OBESSU’s position on the topic. The current state of affairs is that publicly funded education (and also health and other services) seems to be left out of the trade agreement, but many organisations, including Social Platform, want to exclude all services of general interest. The argument goes that there are many types of public services, including education, which are of public interest even though it may be partly or wholly funded privately.
Meanwhile, the European Parliament is taking a stand on the topic. The main committee is the Committee on International Trade, but on the 26th of February there was also a meeting in the Committee on Culture and Education. A “draft opinion” was presented to the Committee and this draft recommends to “specify that nothing in the agreement applies to subsidies or government support with respect to cultural, educational and audiovisual services”. The final vote in the Committee will be in April, but the whole process of TTIP will take much longer than that.
At this point it is very difficult to say what will be the final outcome of the negotiations. The only thing we know for sure is that OBESSU will continue to follow the developments closely.
