'UK-India trade negotiations: why both countries must put development first', 24 October 2022

This report, launched to coincide with the original deadline set by UK and Indian leaders, calls for a pause in the pursuit of a trade agreement until the serious human rights situation in India is rectified.

It also calls for both parties to ensure a future FTA is fully aligned with their commitments to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Serious human rights concerns have been raised by both domestic and international organisations in response to events in India. Allegations include disappearances, torture, excessive use of force and arbitrary arrests, unlawful and arbitrary surveillance of citizens, and listing academics, journalists and lawyers as “enemies of state.”

The Trade Justice Movement (TJM) believes that India’s poor track record on human rights abuses should be adequate reason for the UK to rethink its pursuit of a trade agreement with India altogether. The UK should work with India to address this situation and ensure it has ratified and is implementing the UN Convention Against Torture, of which it is currently only a signatory, and ILO conventions 87 (Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise) and 98 (Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining). TJM believes that such conditions should apply to all of the UK’s trade partners, as has been the case for countries benefiting from enhanced preferences under the European Union’s (EU) Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) scheme.

Once the conditions are in place for negotiations to continue, both parties should ensure that they are undertaken with the explicit aim of aligning the agreement with the United Nations SDGs, including revisiting existing texts. It can be easy to overlook the fact that whilst India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is roughly the same as the UK’s, it is still home to one quarter of the global total of people living in extreme poverty.2 Despite its SDG commitments and India’s status as a developing country, the UK’s published strategic approach to the FTA references the SDGs only once, in a footnote. Instead, the focus is very clearly on increasing exports from UK businesses and achieving geopolitical objectives...