The jury is out on whether a new EU-Vietnam trade pact will do anything to improve people's livelihoods and arrest a deteriorating human rights record, writes Jude Kirton-Darling.
Every day goods produced by European companies abroad enter the internal market, tainted by serious human rights violations. Things will not change unless Europe moves to change them, argue Heidi Hautala and Jude Kirton-Darling.
Some argue that we should tread carefully and refrain from asking too much in terms of human rights from the Vietnamese, because if we do so we could end up pushing Vietnam into China’s orbit. But this doesn’t hold, writes Jude Kirton-Darling.
The EU’s trade deal with Ghana may not have made headlines, but it threatens to undermine the Sustainable Development Goals and West African economic integration, writes Jude Kirton-Darling.
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