{"id":9248,"date":"2015-11-13T10:09:35","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T10:09:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kohelet.org.il\/article\/europe-mislabels-israel\/"},"modified":"2015-11-13T10:09:35","modified_gmt":"2015-11-13T10:09:35","slug":"europe-mislabels-israel","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.kohelet.org.il\/en\/article\/europe-mislabels-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe Mislabels Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"This week the European Commission announced guidelines suggesting that Israeli products from areas that came under its control in 1967 be labeled \u201cIsraeli Settlement\u201d products and not \u201cMade in Israel\u201d as they have been until now.\n\nThe policy carves out a special legal rule for Israel, not only contradicting the European Union\u2019s own official positions on these issues, but also going against rulings of European national courts, and violating basic tenets of the World Trade Organization.\n\nFaced with criticism from both the right and the left in Israel and the United States, the European Union claims its action is merely \u201ctechnical,\u201d rather than politically motivated or punitive. Yet this is belied by the fact that the measure comes in response to explicitly political demands for labeling by some member states\u2019 foreign ministers, as well as anti-Israel NGOs.\n\nIn fact, the labeling controversy must be viewed as just one step in a broader, purposeful and gradual escalation of anti-Israel measures by the European Union. Two years ago, the commission promulgated a regulation that barred spending money on Israeli academic, scientific or cultural projects in the West Bank or Golan Heights. Then the union began refusing to allow imports of certain Israeli agricultural products. Last year, 15 European states issued warnings, alerting people to unspecified legal dangers of interacting with Israeli settlements. These steps, while supposedly motivated by what the European Union sees as Israel\u2019s occupation of territory, have been applied only to Israel, and not to other countries regarded as occupiers in international law, such as Morocco or Turkey.\n\nHaving warned about settlement products, the European Union is now labeling them. Diplomats in Brussels and NGOs have made clear that more coercive measures will follow. In this context, labeling is important not in its immediate economic effects but as a highly visible step in a conscious process of building a legal ghetto around Israel, within which a special set of rules applies.\n\nWhat has largely escaped notice is that the labeling policy violates the European Union\u2019s own express policy on such issues. The commission primarily justifies labeling as a necessary tool to provide consumers with the information that it does not regard the territories \u201cas part of Israel.\u201d However, European Union and national authorities that have addressed the issue have clearly ruled that special labeling is not required in such situations \u2014 neither for consumer protection nor to reflect the European Union\u2019s view of the underlying sovereign status of territories.\n\nThus the European Union allows Morocco \u2014 which has extensive trade ties with Europe, but has occupied Western Sahara since 1975, and populated it heavily with settlers \u2014 to export products from its occupied territory labeled \u201cMade in Morocco.\u201d When challenged, the commission formally declared that labeling such goods as \u201cmade in\u201d Morocco is not misleading, and is consistent with European trade agreements.\n\nAlso, European courts have considered the consumer protection rationale specifically in the context of Israeli products, and rejected it. Just last year, the British Supreme Court ruled, in a case involving Ahava beauty products produced in the West Bank, that \u201cthere was no basis for saying that the average consumer would be misled\u201d by a \u201cMade in Israel\u201d label. The court held that such labeling was not deceptive as a matter of both British and European Union law.\n\nThe problem is not that the European Union fails to live up to its standards in some cases, like that of Morocco. Rather, in these other cases the union explicitly denies the existence of these standards. Such inconsistency is not just hypocrisy. It is a legal violation in its own right. The European Union\u2019s foundational treaties require regulatory \u201cconsistency.\u201d And discrimination against trading partners represents a core violation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and other treaties of the World Trade Organization, as the law professor Avi Bell and I have shown in detail in a recent paper. The union\u2019s labeling guidelines are manifestly discriminatory, as they apply only to Israel.\nThe World Trade Organization treaties establish the legal framework for international commerce. Under the W.T.O.\u2019s nondiscrimination requirement, it is impermissible to apply trade rules and restrictions to some member countries and not to others. And the W.T.O.\u2019s protections apply not just to a country\u2019s sovereign territory, but also to areas of its \u201cinternational responsibility,\u201d such as occupied territories. The United States, with international approval, received the benefit of its international trade treaties even in territories it occupied in World War II, as well as in the Panama Canal Zone, where it made no claim of sovereignty. There is nothing novel about a country\u2019s receiving full trade rights for nonsovereign areas under its administration.\n\nThe United States has a great deal riding on the integrity of the international trading system. But the European Union labeling threatens to establish a precedent that would allow politicization of the system, undermining United States economic interests in broad and unpredictable ways. Thus it is not surprising that earlier this year, the United States passed a law opposing such European Union measures against Israel.\n\nMaking special rules for Israel has the undesired effect of reducing Israel\u2019s incentives to take international law seriously: If the goal posts can be moved, there is less reason to play the game. As a putative role model for international law, the European Union\u2019s greatest weapon is its probity and consistency. By damaging that, it harms its ability to set the global agenda.\n\n&nbsp;","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Making special rules for Israel has the undesired effect of reducing Israel\u2019s incentives to take international law seriously: If the goal posts can be moved, there is less reason to play the game. As a putative role model for international law, the European Union\u2019s greatest weapon is its probity and consistency. By damaging that, it harms its ability to set the global agenda.","protected":false},"featured_media":9211,"template":"","article-category":[525],"custom-tags":[534,533],"ppma_author":[60],"class_list":["post-9248","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","article-category-publications","custom-tags-eu","custom-tags-israeli-homes-in-west-bank-settlements"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Europe Mislabels Israel - kohelet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.kohelet.org.il\/en\/article\/europe-mislabels-israel\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Europe Mislabels Israel - kohelet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Making special rules for Israel has the undesired effect of reducing Israel\u2019s incentives to take international law seriously: If the goal posts can be moved, there is less reason to play the game. 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