Over Million Europeans Sign Petition Against EU Trade Talks With US, Canada

MOSCOW, December 4 (Sputnik) — More than a million people all over the European Union have signed a petition urging the EU to stop negotiations with the United States on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and not ratify the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada.

As of 09:00 GMT, 1,002, 472 people have signed the Stop TTIP and CETA petition, according to the campaign's website.

"We want to prevent TTIP and CETA because they include several critical issues such as investor-state dispute settlement and rules on regulatory cooperation that pose a threat to democracy and the rule of law. We want to prevent lowering of standards concerning employment, social, environmental, privacy and consumers and the deregulation of public services (such as water) and cultural assets from being deregulated in non-transparent negotiations," the petition says.

The EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) are controversial initiatives aimed at deregulating markets between the EU and the US and between the EU and Canada, respectively, to ease the flow of goods and services across the Atlantic. CETA was signed in September and is currently pending approval by the European Parliament, while the TTIP, negotiated in January, is still under debate.

The Stop TTIP petition was founded by the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI), an alliance of some 300 European organizations.

According to the campaign website, the petition must collect a minimum of one million of signatures within a year "to be successful." That success is defined by the campaign as forcing a legal condition on the European Commission to provide a formal response explaining why it is accepting or rejecting the TTIP.

In September, however, the European Commission refused ECI"s request to register Stop TTIP, stating that the petition does not qualify for such a reply. The ECI have launched a legal challenge to this decision.