Dutch activists on Saturday said they have garnered about two-thirds of the signatures needed to force the government to hold a referendum on the new EU-Canada trade pact, in what might prove a fresh setback to the deal.
The controversial accord, seven years in the making, was finally signed last weekend in Brussels after it was held up by last-minute resistance from a Belgian region.
However, the agreement now has to go back to most member states of the EU for ratification.
Photo: EPA
Grassroots groups in the Netherlands are calling for a referendum on whether parliament here should ratify the giant Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), as well as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal with the US.
A petition launched in October last year has collected more than 190,400 signatures out of the 300,000 needed to compel the government to organize a referendum on the issue.
“We want to make it clear to politicians that TTIP and CETA are in our view agreements and treaties that should be more openly discussed and should be drastically changed,” said Niesco Dubbelboer from the Meer Democratie (More Democracy) movement.
Such treaties are “old-fashioned, post-colonial agreements where the interests of big investors and companies” dominate, he said, adding that the interests of “climate and sustainability should be more in the forefront” in negotiations.
His group has joined forces with the Dutch environmental group Milieudefensie, a group called Foodwatch and another nonprofit organization, called the Transnational Institute.
The news comes only months after voters in April rejected a key EU-Ukraine cooperation pact in a similar referendum.
The Netherlands is the only country yet to ratify the deal with Kiev in a major embarrassment to the 28-member EU which has left Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte struggling to find a compromise.
April’s vote, which just scraped the turnout level needed to be valid, was organized by Dutch euroskeptic groups and widely seen as a blow to the EU, pummeled a few months later by the Brexit vote in Britain.
However, the organizers of the CETA petition say they are not anti-Europe. “I am pro-EU, not anti-EU,” Dubbelboer said. “But I do think that Europe should be more democratic.”
“A lot of people already feel that decisionmaking is far away from them, because of Europe. And accords such as CETA and TTIP actually put the decisionmaking even further away.”
However, any referendum on the trade deals remains many months away and would likely only come, if the 300,000 signatures are reached, after March general elections in the Netherlands.
The CETA deal would remove 99 percent of customs duties between the two sides, linking the single EU market of 28 nations with the world’s 10th largest economy.
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