INTRODUCTION

As previous contributions to this volume have illustrated, EU–Korea trade and economic relations have been significantly broadened and strengthened with the conclusion of the bilateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in October 2010, which followed the launch of negotiations on new ‘competitiveness-driven’ FTAs and the designation of Korea as a ‘priority partner’ in the Global Europe Strategy adopted by the EU in November 2006. In the words of the European Commission, the EU-Korea FTA is ground-breaking, as the first such trade deal to be concluded by the Union with an Asian country and containing the most comprehensive trade provisions outside the EU enlargement context. The focus of this contribution is on Chapter 13 of the EU-Korea FTA, entitled ‘Trade and Sustainable Development’ (T&SD), which addresses the interface between trade policy, on the one hand, and environmental and labour protection objectives, on the other. As will be seen, the T&SD chapter can equally be considered as breaking new ground in its development of a regulatory approach to these issues at the bilateral/regional level, which the EU, furthermore, wishes to replicate in its future FTA negotiations.

The chapter begins by placing the T&SD chapter of the EU-Korea FTA into its broader regulatory context at both EU and international levels, as a backdrop for gauging the innovative elements that it has introduced to the regulation of trade-environment and trade-labour linkages. It then turns to analysing the substantive and institutional provisions of the T&SD chapter, highlighting differences and similarities in regulatory approaches vis-à-vis EU practice under other FTAs. In this comparative outlook, particular attention will be paid to the FTA concluded with Colombia and Peru (COPE) in March 2011, in order to assess the extent to which the EU–Korea T&SD chapter has served as a model for other FTA negotiations, following the adoption of the Global Europe Strategy.