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CAMPAIGNERS will challenge the Department for International Trade in court on Thursday over its failure to release uncensored papers from dozens of post-Brexit trade talks.
Global Justice Now activists will be pressing the government in a first-tier tribunal to publish trade papers from talks with 21 countries, including the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China and India.
The group insists that US-British trade negotiation documents that Jeremy Corbyn revealed to the public in Labour’s election campaign “should never have been redacted.”
The papers were released to the campaign group in heavily redacted form earlier this year, which they say is “an affront to democracy.”
Leaked uncensored versions of the papers were later found to reveal that the NHS, British food standards and the government’s “right to regulate” could all be undermined by a US-British trade deal.
Global Justice Now director Nick Dearden said: “Trade deals are supposedly the number-one benefit of Brexit, yet the government has fought tooth and nail to keep plans for them out of the public domain.
“In the case of the US deal, we now know why: because the US administration is pushing hard to gain greater access to our NHS, to push lower-standard food on us post-Brexit, and to hamper our ability to tax and regulate giant Silicon Valley corporations.
“But we’ve only skimmed the surface of what’s out there.
“We also want to know what they’re discussing with a range of other countries including Saudi Arabia, Turkey [and] China. In a democracy, we must have the right to scrutinise what our government is trading away in our name.”