Nurul Izzah Anwar, Member of Parliament for Lembah Pantai and Vice President of KEADILAN, has called for the creation of a Parliamentary Select Committee on the Trans Pacific Partnership. She further stated that the agreement must be ratified by Parliament before signing.
In an op-ed published in the Malay Mail she warned that “…There are many other contentious issues which, if agreed to in a signed TPPA, will adversely affect Malaysians. These include higher medicine prices due to stronger patents, new rules which the TPPA will ask the country to adopt as domestic policies such as how the government spends its money (government procurement) and the operations of state enterprises. The freedom to make or change our own policies will be curbed.”
Last week the Malaysian Ministry of International Trade and Industry hold an open consultation session on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which approximately 1,000 people attended. The Star reports that the participants’ response to the agreement was “mostly hostile.” The Malaysian Insider reports that opponents of the agreement were critical of the lack of transparency and limited interaction with stakeholders
Burhan Irwan Cheong, lead IP negotiator for the Malaysian TPP negotiating team, told participants that the intellectual property chapter “is one of the largest and more complex chapters and we have a lot of catching up to do to reach a state of consensus in the negotiations, compared with other sections in the agreement.” Digital News Asia’s account of the consultation notes that “Malaysia has already made moves to align itself with some of the provisions outlined in leaked documents posted online. For example, the Copyright (Amendment) Act 2012 which came into force on March 1, 2012, introduced several key changes.”
