Mr. David O'Sullivan:

I thank the Deputy. What the European Union has tried to do in respect of environmental issues, and labour issues in particular, is to encourage the ratification and implementation of agreed international standards. It has not sought to impose European standards on countries for whom state development deals might not be appropriate. However, where there are international environmental conventions or international fishing conventions on illegal and irregular fishing, in terms of the conventions of the International Labour Organization, ILO, we have always included in our trade deals a commitment from our trading partners to ratify and implement those agreements, and we have held them to that. I instanced in my first presentation or in answer to one of the questions where we recently initiated dispute settlement proceedings against South Korea for failure to ratify a number of ILO conventions to which it had committed. The Deputy will have seen the controversy with China over the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment which, by the way, does not include an ISDS because people did not want to go down that road with China. One of the controversial elements in that is a requirement on China to adopt or to make best efforts, according to the Chinese, ILO conventions, particularly on forced labour and prison labour. I believe that Europe's commitment to those principles and international standards in trade deals has helped to increase their spread and to increase the standards in a number of our trading partner countries.