{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.016371971185330715, 'fraction_numerical': 0.003929273084479371, 'mean_word_length': 5.186234817813765, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Unsustainable Lightness of Enforcement Procedures: Environmental Standards in the Eu-Mercosur FTA

The European Union has been increasingly active for more than a decade in the conclusion of free trade agreements (FTAs) directly with partner countries and outside the WTO. This has brought to the conclusion of some very large free trade agreements such as the CETA with Canada or the more recent EU-Japan FTA. On the 28th of June 2019 the EU reached an agreement in principle on another major deal with Mercosur countries (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay). All recent EU FTAs contain clauses obliging the parties to the free trade agreement to respect a set of basic environmental standards. This short contribution assesses what kind of obligations on environmental protection are included in the EU-Mercosur FTA and if the enforcement mechanism is up to the ask. The main claim of this short contribution is that whereas EU-Mercosur does contain some obligations on environmental protection, their obligatory value is often weakened by too vague and unprescriptive legal wording. In addition, the enforcement mechanism remains considerably weaker than the one used to enforce economic clauses and intellectual property rights of the same EU-Mercosur FTA. The article concludes with some proposals on how to amend the enforcement mechanism in EU FTAs looking at EU laws on commerce and other international experiences such as the recent Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for a Transpacific Partnership (CPTPP).