Uruguay advance with a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Türkiye to continue expanding their commercial relations outside the regional blocs, but a bill could block the negotiations: an initiative that seeks to penalize those who deny the armenian genocide.
When in 2022, the Colorado representative conrado rodriguez presented the project to penalize denialist speeches who cast doubt on both the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, I hardly thought that this would be an obstacle in future diplomatic exchanges with Turkey. However, and while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs moves quickly with the signing of an FTA with the country that recently re-elected Recep Tayyip Erdogan As its president, the embassy of this country in Uruguay conveyed to the government its “concern” about the initiative.
The wake-up call comes at a critical moment, when talks to agree to a joint feasibility study —the step prior to formally negotiating an FTA— are 98% closed and the doors of resuming the dialogue to complete this first stage of the process are on the horizon. According to El País, the problem for the Chancellery is twofold: on the one hand, he understands that the Turkish concern can have a negative impact on trade negotiations; but, on the other, asking Parliament to scrap a bill—which has cross-party support—could “affect the independence of powers.
For Conrado Rodríguez, promoter of the project, “this is a human rights cause in which Uruguay has always been involved”, to the point that the country was the first to recognize this genocide in 1965, the year from which other States followed the same path. And in recent years USA He has also recognized it, ”added the representative.
The project in question is under study at the Constitution and Codes Commission of the Lower House, and it is hoped that his treatment begins in the short term, said the deputy.
The start of negotiations with Türkiye
Seeking to continue the link with Türkiye, Foreign Minister Francisco Bustillo, together with the ambassador in Germany, Fernando Lopez Fabregat —who until recently had been in charge of the FTA negotiations with different countries, including the Eurasian one— traveled twice to this country, once to istanbul and another to Ankara.
In these visits, according to what López Fabregat told the Senate commission, Uruguay verified “that there is not a total coincidence between the Turkish Foreign Ministry and some other departments of its government, such as the ministries that deal with trade and agriculture ”.
“In that sense, we could observe that there was certain reluctance regarding entering into negotiations regarding the agricultural chapterwhich in the Turkish case refers to a productive sector that is not characterized by marked competitiveness”, said the ambassador, adding: “Having a counterpart like the Uruguayan, whose exportable offer is characterized by having an agricultural offer, I would say, aggressive In commercial terms, it led to some reluctance in the Turkish case at the beginning” of the talks, precisely in response to the inequality of the sectors.
Thus, it began with an analysis, “at a technical level, (of) the commercial flows of both parties”, as well as of the “economic-commercial reality” of the partiesconcluded the diplomat.
Source: Ambito
