Human rights abuses in Burma threaten trading

Date: 05/12/1996

By Elizabeth Wise

THE EU is close to coming up with a response to Burma's human rights abuses which is expected to lead to a country being stripped of its trading privileges for the first time ever.

After listening to evidence of forced labour throughout Burma during a three-day hearing this autumn, officials this week delivered a report to the full European Commission.

They now expect Commissioners to decide “rapidly” to remove Burma from the list of countries benefiting from the Union's Generalised System of Preferences (GSP), a set of tariff concessions for developing countries designed to encourage them to manufacture and export.

“There will be a decision before the end of the year,” said an aide to External Relations Commissioner Manuel Marín.

If the Commission does decide to act, and its proposal is supported by member state governments, Burma would become the first country ever to be suspended from the GSP list, which gives trading benefits to 175 nations.

By stripping Rangoon of its GSP privileges, the EU would be setting a precedent which would make it easier to mete out the same punishment to other trading partners. “We will know better how to go through the process,” said an official.

The Commission has the option of simply closing the case, but Marín aides say they do not expect political considerations to stand in the way of their evaluation of the human rights abuses in Burma being accepted.

“Nobody doubts there is forced labour,” said an official who attended the hearings where witnesses described how the Burmese government and its military forced civilians, prisoners and children to work. “The case seems clear and straightforward.”

Since Rangoon rejected Marín's offer to conduct an inquiry in Burma in the wake of the Brussels hearings, the Commissioner is now free to propose unilateral action to his colleagues.

Under EU rules, the Commission may act upon the information available to it when a third country at the centre of such an investigation prevents it from collecting more.

If, as expected, the Commission judges that Rangoon should lose its trade benefits, it would then have to submit a proposal to this effect for approval by Union foreign ministers.

But banishment from the GSP list would probably have little more impact on Rangoon's military leaders than the protests by thousands of students who marched through the capital earlier this week.

GSP benefits, providing a 2&percent; to 5&percent; discount on EU import tariffs, apply only to Burma's industrial goods, of which the Union imports few. Officials estimate that losing GSP status would only cost the country some 5 to 10 million ecu.

In June 1995, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) lodged complaints with the Commission about child labour in Burma and forced labour in Pakistan, urging that both countries be suspended from the Union's GSP list.

But Commission officials stress that the outcome of the Burma hearing will have no bearing on the Pakistan case.

The Commission does not want to proceed on the complaint against Karachi, because it is anxious to give the new government time to respond to complaints about labour practices and wants to avoid jeopardising current EU-Pakistan talks on a cooperation agreement.

If, however, it formally refuses to pursue the ICFTU's complaint, the Commission might give Pakistan's new government the impression that it need not continue the current positive trend. “We do not want to shelve the complaint and give the new government a carte blanche,” said one official.