Will Obama Turn a Blind Eye to Malaysia’s Mass Graves in a Cynical Bid to Salvage the Controversial TPP?

Just after the discovery of mass graves for human trafficking victims in Malaysia, the Obama administration is reportedly planning to remove Malaysia from its list of the world’s worst human trafficking offenders.

Why would the Obama administration do such a thing?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Malaysia is a negotiating member of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and that under U.S. law the TPP cannot be Fast Tracked through Congress if one of the countries involved (i.e. Malaysia) is on the administration’s human trafficking blacklist.

If the Obama administration wants to Fast Track the TPP through Congress with Malaysia included (and without the democratic annoyances of checks, balances, and amendments), it has two options:

1. Pressure Malaysia to end its deplorable human trafficking abuses
2. Pretend those abuses do not exist 

In a cynical bid to salvage the unpopular TPP, the Obama administration has reportedly chosen the latter option.  Inside sources report that the administration plans to remove Malaysia from its list of the worst human trafficking offenders, despite the country’s documented deterioration of human trafficking enforcement, in an annual State Department report expected to be released next week. 

Turning a blind eye to Malaysia’s grave human rights violations in effort to rescue the TPP, which would grant Malaysia privileged access to the U.S. market, would be simply shameful.

It would also backfire, instead adding to the controversy surrounding the TPP. If the Obama administration is willing to ignore cages for humans in Malaysia’s people-smuggling camps, why should we believe it would not also ignore TPP member Brunei’s criminalization of homosexuality, TPP member Vietnam’s widespread child labor, or TPP member Peru’s rollback of environmental protections?

If the Obama administration removes Malaysia from the human trafficking blacklist, it will only bolster criticism from human rights, religious, LGBT, women’s, labor and environmental organizations that the TPP’s touted human rights, labor and environmental provisions are mere fig leaves that would fail to actually curb systematic abuses among TPP members.

In its tunnel-vision push for the TPP, the Obama administration has already dismissed widespread concerns about job offshoring, wage stagnation, unsafe food, environmental degradation, inaccessible medicines, Internet restrictions, and financial instability.  Will it now add human trafficking to the list?   We will soon find out. 

Comments

[Hattie Heavner]

Fast Track for TPP will; not be good for the USA. Other countries do not have protections for nearly as many citizens as we do.

[Hattie Heavner]

Fast Track TTP will not be good for the USA. Many other nations do not have protections for many citizens that we do.

[Pat]

TPP, per U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions who read the TPP, has stated that the TPP creates a political and economic Pacific Union, like a nascent Euopean Union. The Pacific Union will be an international body writing rules and regulations. Read:
http://www.eagleforum.org/publications/column/no-wonder-obama-wont-let-us-read-tpp.html