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Pratap Ravindran

PUNE, Feb. 14

THE first Global Accountability Report has given high marks to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), ranking it third on access to online information, eighth on member control and fourth overall among 18 inter-Governmental organisations, transnational corporations and international NGOs.

The report is the first of its kind to compare the accountability of these three types of organisations. Scores were given for the organisation's performance in two aspects of accountability: Member control of governance structures and access to information.

One World Trust, a United Kingdom charity, started the Global Accountability Project in 1999 with the aim of better understanding what international accountability means and how this can be improved.

It brought together a group of experts drawn from the NGOs, universities and international institutions to guarantee the accountability and transparency of the project.

The report used access to online information as a proxy for an organisation's overall transparency. Under this criterion, the WTO has been ranked third, below the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Federation of the Red Cross, and above the World Bank, GlaxoSmithKline, Rio Tinto and Shell.

The report says: ``Information on the WTO's trade activities is excellent.

The WTO provides access to the legal texts of its agreements by topic, alongside a full, non-technical description of the law. This is very important given the technical nature of much of the work its covers...''

The report goes on to note that the WTO is only one of two inter-Governmental organisations surveyed that publishes its entire Web site in more than one language, in this case French and Spanish.

On member control, the WTO is ranked eighth among the 18 organisations.

According to the report, ``decisions (in the WTO) are taken by consensus so each member has equal decision-making power''.

However, while all the members are given representation on the governing body, smaller developing country members do not even have an office in Geneva, making it difficult for them to attend meetings. And then again, the existence of informal decision-making structures reduces the ability of all members to have a say in the decisions made by the organisation.

On this subject, the report concludes: ``The presence of these informal realities overshadows the fact that all members are represented at the executive and that decision-making is based on consensus, seemingly preventing a minority of members dominating decision-making. Amendments to the governing articles require consensus.''

However, various entities that are less than convinced that the WTO is adequately transparent in its functioning point out some continuing deficiencies in the body: the exemption of the WTO from a recent international freedom of information agreement;

the lack of transparency of the dispute settlement process; the workings of associated standard setting bodies such as the Codex Alimentarius Commission; the power of the major trading nations in setting the agenda and dominating negotiations; the weakness of small countries in being able to, if necessary, implement trade sanctions subsequent to a dispute; the power held by the appellate body, made up of a small group of trade experts; the ability of trans-national corporations (TNCs) to influence the process; and the all-or-nothing nature of the multilateral trade agreements.

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