The Inclusion and Enforcement of Sustainability into the European Union common Commercial Policy and the Struggle to Enforce it
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The European Union (the “EU”)’s concern for sustainability is well-known. In particular, the EU has increasingly added sustainability across all its actions including, for instance, in its negotiations with third countries such as Korea or Canada. In this article we will review how the EU has added sustainability in the Common Commercial Policy (“CCP”). The CCP reflects the economic and political priorities of the EU and is considered as one of the key elements of EU trade. In this article we will focus particularly on Free Trade Agreements (“FTAs”), one of the main instruments of the CCP. The EU’s inclusion of sustainability in the CCP and FTAs has followed a gradual process that deserves to be analyzed and explained, to understand the full extent of the commitments in sustainable matters and how these commitments have increased over time. Furthermore, the enforcement specificities of these commitments also deserve analysis. A special mechanism, known as Trade and Sustainable Development (“TSD”) chapter enforcement mechanism, was created to effectively enforce these provisions. The TSD chapter is inspired in the State-to-State Dispute Settlement approach, widely used in the World Trade Organization (the “WTO”), the main international organization dealing with international trade. The system of the TSD chapters implies that there is no mandatory enforcement mechanism but rather a system of panels of impartial experts who only serve recommendations in case of conflict. We will analyze the reasons behind adopting this softer enforcement approach, as well as academic and political views on it. We will also be comparing the CCP approach with (i) the WTO -given the fact that the WTO is the system that most countries follow, as members of it- and (ii) the external trade policy followed by the United States of America (the “US”), the champion of free trade. We will finalize this section with a reflection on future outlook and potential improvements. The article will conclude by assessing if the approach taken by the EU was made out of necessity or if it was a voluntary choice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".