Najma Heptullah Builds A Valuable Bridge With Wto

India has discovered an unlikely bridge to the World Trade Organisation in Rajya Sabha, deputy chairman Najma Heptulla. In her role as President of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, she is engaged in a series of interactions with the higher echelons of the WTO.

She chaired a joint IPU-UNESCO conference on Globalisation last December, at which the WTO was represented in stregth. Now, she plans a joint IPU-WTO conference, to be organised in tandem with the European Parliament and the US Congress and Senate next January. It will focus on how to get the Seattle process back on the rails.

Briefing newspersons yesterday, Heptulla referred to last year's millennium round as "the Seattle fiasco" and emphasised that she wants to steer the IPU, which represents more than 130 Parliaments across the world, toward a greater role in determining global trade policy.

 

She argued that, since Parliaments represent all shades of political opinion in each country, the IPU was more representative of popular opinion than the United Nations and its affiliated organisations, since these represent only the governments and therefore the ruling parties of different countries.

She added that, since Parliaments have to pass the laws consequent on global treaties, and often to ratify these, parliamentarians should therefore involve themselves in trade policies, particularly amid the wide scope of changes in an era of globalisation.

Heptulla announced that the IPU would also organise a conference in India in association with FICCI on democracy, governance and globalisation.

In addition, the IPU would organise a global conference in India, she said, on information technology over the next year or two.

She also announced that, in keeping with the IPU's efforts to promote gender equality and women's participation in democratic processes, she had written to Speaker GMC Balayogi about the IPU's concern that the legislation for women's reservation in Indian legislatures be expedited.

She pointed out that the then prime minister, HD Deve Gowda, had given an undertaking to the IPU conference in New Delhi in 1997 that the legislation would soon be passed.

Heptulla has recently returned from Jordan, where she chaired the biennial conference of the IPU.

Among the decisions taken there, she stated, was the suspension of Pakistan, Sudan and the Ivory Coast because of coups and the suspension of democracy in these countries.