Section 7: Challenges of Regulation

Section 7: Challenges of Regulation

“Who Sponsors Global Regulation? … Global Regulation of Tobacco … Global Regulation of Whaling … Global Regulation of Sports Doping Drugs … Making Connections”
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Summaries

  • 7. Challenges of Regulation > Who Sponsors Global Regulation? > Lectures
  • 7. Challenges of Regulation > Global Regulation of Tobacco > Lecture
  • 7. Challenges of Regulation > Global Regulation of Whaling > Lecture
  • 7. Challenges of Regulation > Global Regulation of Sports Doping Drugs > Lecture
  • 7. Challenges of Regulation > Making Connections > Interview Video

7. Challenges of Regulation > Who Sponsors Global Regulation? > Lectures

  • Global regulation is a difficult and often an impossible task.
  • One might even say that the globalization process itself consists of a very large number of interlocking and regulated systems that include global transportation systems, immigration systems, communication systems, market systems, atmospheric monitoring systems, surveillance systems, and many, many more.
  • Global regulatory initiatives can originate with international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Whaling Commission, or the World Anti-Doping Agency.
  • Specialized agencies of the United Nations having regulatory responsibilities include the International Maritime Organization, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the International Labor Organization, the International Telecommunications Union, and the Universal Postal Union.
  • Global regulation can also be undertaken or supported by various Nongovernmental Organizations, or NGOs, such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or Transparency International.
  • Nation states too can declare an interest in the enforcement of an international rule or standard and pursue this interest at an international forum, such as a court of law.
  • ” ” It is fair to say that the official representatives of this global community are expected to aspire to humane values, such as compassion for others and a sense of justice.
  • It is tempting to make a distinction between practical and idealistic international organizations and their respective regulatory roles.
  • Elsewhere in this course we have seen the distinguishing between practical and ideal roles and their regulatory duties is somewhat artificial.
  • Global governance and its regulatory systems are ideal constructs as much as they are practical arrangements, because there is no ultimate source of authority to mandate and formulate regulatory codes.
  • The Vatican, which is the oldest international organization in the world, claims to possess both an authoritative mandate and a regulatory code of conduct for human beings.
  • “At the international level,” Professor Matilda Dahl, has observed, “There is no single regulator. But even so, states continue to follow rules made up by various others. These are often different types of international organizations. One might even claim,” she says, “That states are following scripts,” written by global bodies that seem to possess the authority to regulate the affairs of nations.
  • The rest of the lectures in this section present three regulatory scenarios that illustrate both the basic aspects of global regulation and the unpredictable complexities of the conflicts between contending forces that make these scenarios into compelling dramas of the globalization process.

7. Challenges of Regulation > Global Regulation of Tobacco > Lecture

  • In 2012, Professor Gregory Connolly, a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, reported that tobacco had killed one hundred million people during the 20th century, and that it could cost a billion lives in the 21st century.
  • The Australian lawyer Neil Francey proposed in 1999 that the production and sale of tobacco products arguably constitutes a crime against humanity.
  • Even if the directors and executives of tobacco companies did not intend to cause harm, he added, such conduct is comparable to manslaughter, where death is an unintended consequence of a recklessly negligent act.
  • When in 2012 the High Court of Australia ruled six to one in favor of requiring cigarette packaging to display public health warnings and graphic pictures of smoking-related diseases, even the dissenting judge called the manufacturers of tobacco products purveyors of lies and death.
  • The official global consensus on the medical damage done by tobacco is expressed in the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which was adopted by the 56th World Health Assembly on May 21, 2003, and went into effect on February 27, 2005.
  • The spread of the tobacco epidemic is facilitated through a variety of complex factors with cross-border effects, including trade liberalization and direct foreign investment.
  • Other factors, such as global marketing, transnational tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship, and the international movement of contraband and counterfeit cigarettes, have also contributed to the explosive increase in tobacco use.
  • The story of how the global tobacco industry has prospered despite the regulatory measures enforced by the WHO and by many countries is a lesson in how political power is exercised in the age of market globalism.
  • The trans-nationalization of marketing and promotion of harmful commodities such as tobacco is one important component of globalized public health threats.
  • Industry strategists, the health experts report, are encouraging the homogenization of the global tobacco industries and the creation of a new global shared culture enshrined in the concept of a global smoker.
  • From the perspective of the tobacco companies, they are the ones who must defend the rights of these global smokers from the machinations of the governments that are trying to save them from a lifetime of smoking and its terrible costs.
  • The uniquely perverse feature of the struggles between nations and tobacco companies is that it is human beings, not local economies, who are being ruined.
  • In the case of the Australian Packaging Law of 2012, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International, a veritable global alliance for lung cancer, filed suit against the Australian government claiming that the Tobacco Plain Packaging Act amounted to an acquisition of property.
  • Dr. Chan’s optimism about the prospects for putting big tobacco out of business was due to the fact that a nation state had won a clear-cut legal victory over the tobacco multinationals and their army of lawyers and lobbyists.
  • Any prognosis regarding the future of tobacco consumption must take into account the legal and political war the transnational tobacco companies have been waging against countries that attempt to reduce tobacco use, and against the World Health Organization itself.
  • This is a global campaign, directed at limits imposed on the advertising of tobacco products, the size of health warnings on cigarette packages, the placement of disturbing images of smoking-related disease effects on packages, and higher cigarette taxes.
  • This strategy offered the additional advantage of focusing entirely on treaty rights, while distracting attention away from the proven relationship between tobacco and disease.
  • Philip Morris also sued Brazil, claiming that its proposed cigarette packaging images of tobacco-related disease were inaccurate, and that the display of such images would vilify tobacco companies.
  • The secret and underhanded political strategies of the tobacco multinationals were revealed in detail in 2000 with the release of a World Health Organization document titled “Tobacco Company Strategies to Undermine Tobacco Control Activities.
  • ” According to the director general of the WHO, the tobacco companies had made efforts to prevent implementation of public health policy and efforts to reduce funding of tobacco control within UN organizations.
  • Manipulating the scientific and public debate about the health effects of tobacco, and secret monitoring of WHO meetings and conferences.
  • A principal strategy of the tobacco multinationals has been to persuade developing countries that tobacco control is a first-world issue that threatens their economic viability.
  • Giving up tobacco as a cash crop would, the companies warned, produce economic destabilization in tobacco growing countries.
  • Tobacco control would cost more than the health damage done by the use of tobacco, they said.
  • Tobacco companies had been focusing their marketing efforts on developing countries in Africa and Asia, precisely because successful anti-tobacco measures in the first-world have greatly reduced the number of smokers in developed societies.
  • The nature of the African predicament became clear in 2007 when the Nigerian federal government filed a suit in the high court of Abuja against British American Tobacco, Philip Morris International, and International Tobacco Limited.
  • It was not enforcing two tobacco control laws that were already on the books, and it was afraid that Nigerian lawsuits against the tobacco companies might deter other multinationals from investing in Nigeria.

7. Challenges of Regulation > Global Regulation of Whaling > Lecture

  • On June 26, 2013, United Nation’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, heard the first arguments in a case relating to Japan’s annual whale hunt in the frigid waters of the southern ocean that surrounds Antarctica.
  • Japan’s counter argument was that the killing of whales is legal under Article Eight of the 1946 International Convention for the regulation of whaling, which allows whaling for purposes of scientific research.
  • The Japanese call the whale hunt research whaling, to which the Australian representative to the court replied, “you don’t kill 935 whales a year to conduct scientific research.
  • Watson justifies the ramming of Japanese whaling ships by his own vessels by citing the United Nations World Charter for Nature, a resolution passed by the General Assembly in 1982 which allows individuals to take independent action to safeguard and conserve nature in areas beyond national jurisdiction.
  • The history and politics of the Antarctic whaling dispute present us with a particularly interesting case study in the complications of global regulation.
  • The international whaling commission, or IWC, was formed in 1946 in accordance with the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling.
  • After decades of inaction, whale populations were drastically declining, and the IWC adopted a moratorium on commercial whaling.
  • On its website, the IWC states in 1986, the commission introduced zero catch limits for commercial whaling.
  • The Japanese whaling operation and the controversy that surrounds it are not mentioned, despite the fact that the Japanese killed more than 1,000 whales in 2005 in the course of doing what they call research.
  • Its primary concerns include overfishing and commercial whaling, but it rejects the tactics of Paul Watson.
  • Greenpeace, according to a 2008 statement, will continue to act to defend the whales, but will never attack or endanger the whalers.
  • Greenpeace takes partial credit for the 1982 moratorium on commercial whaling that put an end to the whaling activities of the Soviet Union, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Spain, thereby saving thousands of whales from harpooning and death.
  • This brief account of the major actors involved in the global regulation of whaling makes it clear that what we refer to as regulation can be carried out with differing degrees of determination, or militancy, and that regulators may differ in what we may call temperament.
  • The International Whaling Commission, like many other transnational regulatory bodies, is an international organization whose 89 members are all nation states, its transnational authority derives from the authority conferred on it by nation states.
  • It is the Sea Shepherds, not the IWC, that is saving whales in the southern ocean, for it is the negligence, the failures, and the crimes of national and international bodies that have created enormous opportunities for NGOs.

7. Challenges of Regulation > Global Regulation of Sports Doping Drugs > Lecture

  • At the beginning of this section, I said that global regulation is both a fascinating topic of virtually unlimited scope and a tremendous challenge for any international organization that is charged with formulating, monitoring, and enforcing a uniform set of standards around the world.
  • We will focus primarily on sport at the elite level, which means the global sports entertainment industry that includes the Olympic movement, national and international sports federations, and transnational professional sports leagues such as the UEFA Champions League, which features teams from over 50 countries.
  • This global system must regulate many matters including those having to do with athlete’s eligibility, the buying and selling of teams, and the staging of international sports festivals.
  • In May of 2013, UEFA president, Michel Platini, renewed his call for the formation of a European sports police force to respond to widespread problems that include sports betting, corruption and match fixing, sometimes involving mafia type organizations and hooliganism in stadiums that can include racist taunts directed at black football players.
  • As we shall see, this situation has motivated WADA to pursue relationships with governmental police agencies that have the power to make searches and arrests and to confiscate the drugs they are able to take from organized drug traffickers.
  • The use of anabolic steroids and other doping drugs by elite athletes was rampant.
  • Its declared objectives are to provide comprehensive leadership in the anti-doping campaign, to persuade anti-doping in international sports organizations to comply with the WADA code, to promote the involvement of public authorities and leaders in the anti-doping struggle, to encourage anti-doping education, to create a scientific research program in support of anti-doping, to ensure that anti-doping laboratories meet international standards, and to be a respected organization whose corporate governance and operating standards reflect best international practice.
  • In other words, WADA’s function as a world agency is to play an inspirational role, to motivate people and institutions with real power to do their part to combat doping.
  • The obstacles to effective doping control are currently unmanageable and are likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.
  • The most dramatic development in recent years has been WADA’s decision to rely less on drug testing technology and more on law enforcement to detect and deter athletes who are tempted to use doping.
  • Rather than relying on testing and laboratory analysis, as has been the case in the past, WADA wants to increase the number of non-analytical convictions secured through intelligence from Interpol and border control agencies.
  • There is in short an emerging consensus among key anti-doping executives that the policing of doping should be joined by the international and government agencies that are charged with hunting down the world’s most dangerous criminals.
  • A brief survey of some recent doping cases illustrates some of the complications that WADA faces as it attempts to create uniformly effective regulation of doping cases around the world.
  • Second, governments can treat the development of high performance athletes as a national priority and sponsor scientific initiatives that may or may not involve the production of doping agents.
  • Doping by elite athletes who are monitored by WADA constitutes only one type of performance enhancement within a much larger category of doping practices that include nonathletic uses of athletic doping drugs by very large numbers of people around the world.
  • The ongoing expansion of this huge and often unregulated pharmacopoeia means that WADA must find a way to persuade elite athletes not to dope.
  • How can anti-doping officials persuade elite athletes that they are duty bound to abstain from this rising tide of enhancements? How can these officials convince them that they have an obligation to compete drug free to preserve the integrity of their own subculture? Let us now summarize the three major obstacles to the global regulation of doping drugs.
  • Governments have sponsored research to push the limits of performance and promote the production of doping drugs.
  • Either WADA will somehow manage to create a countervailing ethos of self restraint among elite athletes or the relationship between WADA and the athletes it monitors will stabilize in the form of the normal homeostasis that characterizes the relationship between any police force and the population whose behavior it regulates.

7. Challenges of Regulation > Making Connections > Interview Video

  • Section 7 is about global regulation of tobacco, of doping, whaling, and fisheries.
  • In other words, there is a lot of space left over for good works for improving the human condition, for improving the environment, for promoting the survival of animal species that is simply not done by big, established, powerful organizations, which leaves a great deal of room for many, many non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, to step in and do necessary work.
  • What really counts is global support, and so that Greenpeace will announce that it has something like three million supporters around the world, Amnesty International has also reported that they have about three million members around the world.
  • Does the tobacco industry exemplify a contest for power between the multinational corporation and the nation state? Very much so.
  • The tobacco multinationals have legal standing of that kind in any number of legal systems around the world.
  • Such is the relationship between the big tobacco multinationals and sovereign countries that there is a legal contest between these two competing interests.
  • If adequate regulation means halving the number of people in your population who smoke, and that, roughly speaking, is what has happened in the United States over the past 25 years or so, then that is quote unquote, “adequate regulation”.
  • So if adequate regulation is a significant drop in the morbidity and mortality that is caused by tobacco consumption, then leaving the industry active to one degree or another will be adequate from that point of view.
  • There is a sense that the biosphere that the human race and all living things inhabit has an integrity and an enormous importance, of course, to the survival of life on planet Earth.
  • I don’t think that view is shared by too many people, but that is part of his radical environmental ideology that prompts him to go to the southern oceans when the Japanese whaling fleet is there and to ram them, and to interfere with their whale killing.
  • Is doping a medical, legal, or a moral issue? It’s all three.
  • It is a medical issue because there is, and especially when you have athletes and others, there are plenty of recreational athletes who use hormones outside medical guidelines.
  • There’s an army around the world of bodybuilders, possibly in the millions who are using anabolic steroids and other drugs outside medical guidelines.
  • It is against the rules to ingest any of these hundreds and hundreds of substances that are on the world agency’s list, then that means that a social contract is being violated by the person who takes the drug for the purpose of enhancing his or her performance, and this is a big, big cultural crisis in the world of high-performance sport at this time.
  • Doping controversies have occurred in various sports- cycling, weightlifting, baseball, and others- but we haven’t seen a large controversy in world football.
  • So that the idea that world football is somehow doping drug-free is not accurate.
  • The public’s sense of whether a sport is doping-infested or not has a lot to do with the public relations abilities of the head of the league, the National Football League in the United States for example, which has been very effective in suggesting to the world that they have their testing program, that it works, and you hear very little doping news out of the National Football League.
  • So that my sense of it, as somebody who’s followed this for a long time, is the National Football League has been clever in the way it handled public relations regarding whatever kind of doping is going on in that league, and I think it is severely underestimated.
  • In world soccer, you have a similar situation in that the international federation that runs world soccer, namely FIFA, is an international federation that has famously and for years been involved in accusations and confirmations of financial corruption.
  • When it comes to drug testing, FIFA points out that over the last four World Cups, there has not been a single doping positive.
  • Thousands of athletes over the last four World Cup, and these are people operating at the highest level, on some of these teams.
  • All they have to do is say, look, we have a medical commission, we have an extensive testing system, and the good news is that for the last four World Cups in a row they haven’t found a single doping positive.
  • There is a great deal of regulating that needs to be done in the global sports world.
  • The attempt to limit the really negative fallout of match fixing that would be organized for criminal gambling organizations, which is apparently becoming worse and worse, the integrity of the game has to be defended.
  • Transnational crime needs to be regulated as best it can be, and both of these are just enormous, enormous tasks to be carried out on a global scale.
  • There’s a lot of regulating to do in this global world of ours.

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