EU's India trade pact draft omits WMD, rights

BRUSSELS, March 5 (Reuters) The European Commission said on Monday it had proposed a new trade and investment pact with India omitting clauses on weapons of mass destruction and rights, despite worries this could set a risky precedent.

Annalisa Giannella, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana's representative for non-proliferation and WMD, voiced concern last week about support for omitting the WMD clause by some EU states discussing the proposed negotiating mandate for the pact.

She told a European Parliament committee on Thursday that omitting the clause would set ''a terrible double standard''.

''If we were to adopt for India an approach different from the approach we adopt with other countries, I think we would abandon altogether the idea of having a WMD clause with third countries,'' she said.

Commission spokeswoman Emma Udwin said the EU executive had proposed a purely technical agreement on trade and investment and added: ''The Commission does not routinely include standard political clauses in agreements of this kind.'' ''We are committed to non-proliferation and the fight against weapons of mass destruction, but this is not the place for a WMD clause,'' she said.

Udwin said clauses on WMD and rights were already in a Joint Action Plan agreed by India and the European Union in 2005.

An EU official said India did not want a WMD clause in the trade and investment agreement and India's Commerce Minister Kamal Nath was quoted in Monday's Financial Time as saying that a clause on democracy and rights would be a ''deal breaker''.

''This is meant to be a specifically targeted trade and investment agreement, which it will not be if other elements come into it,'' he told the paper, which made no reference to the WMD clause.

HUGE MARKET EU officials said EU member states were still debating whether the agreement should be ''mixed'' -- that is including the controversial political clauses, or left purely technical.

An official said the hope was to finalise the EU negotiating mandate by April and one proposal was to include a WMD clause in a separate updated cooperation agreement signed in 1994.

EU officials say some member states are anxious to avoid offending India, which the European Union sees as potentially a huge market for trade and investment if it can lower relatively high levels of protection with a bilateral trade agreement.

An EU official said the only binding parts of a WMD clause would be for New Delhi to comply with its existing international obligations relating to weapons of mass destruction.

These would include conventions on chemical and biological weapons, but not the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which India is not party.

However, a second element requires a commitment from a country to take steps towards accession to other multilateral treaties in the area of non-proliferation and disarmament, suggesting India should start a process towards the NPT.

A third element requires an effective system of export controls related to WMDs.

Washington, the EU's main trade rival, has controversially agreed to civil nuclear cooperation with India despite that country's atomic weapons and refusal to sign the NPT.

REUTERS DKS KP2104