Morning meeting of the Costa Rican Legislative AssemblyThe sixth and most controversial bill in the Free Trade Agreement agenda, the General Telecommunications Law, will go to vote this week, now that the abbreviated legislation period has ended. The objective of the bill is to open the telecommunications industry to foreign competitors, thus breaking the state-run Costa Rican Institute of Electricity (ICE’s) monopoly.

The Legislative Assembly has been discussing motions and amendments to the bill that will serve to regulate the newly opened industry. Plans have been discussed to create a new government entity that will be put in charge of this task, with duties that include implementing and regulating taxes on foreign companies. They also discussed creating a National Telecommunications Fund to give financial aid to state institutions to help them compete with foreign technological infrastructure.

The time to present and defend amendments was limited to 20 sessions by ‘Article 208′ in the Legislative Regulations, which was opposed and declared unconstitutional by many opponents of the bill. The 20 sessions officially ended Monday morning, after a large part of some 538 amendments were discussed. Many of these were frivolous changes presented by the opposition to prolong discussion.

It was predicted that official voting on the bill would begin that same afternoon, however, the president of Congress, Francisco Pacheco, called for one more session before putting the bill to vote. During this session, which started around 11a.m. yesterday, each legislator had the opportunity to make an argument for 10 minutes. Pacheco said he did this to compensate for the fact that some of the sessions were quite short, and many points were left undiscussed.

Once everyone was given the opportunity to speak, the voting should have started last night. However, minutes detailing the morning’s votes on 168 amendments was not ready in time. The voting took place at a rapid rate of about one vote every 15 seconds since no time was given for legislators to defend each amendment, as the abbreviated process in Article 208 specifies. The Citizen’s Action Party (PAC), perturbed by this fact, walked out on the morning session, thus further speeding up the process.

It is hoped that the official debates and voting will begin today.

Foreseeing the Congress’s inability to pass all 12 bills before the Feb. 29th deadline, the government has already announced that it will ask for an extension from all nations involved in the treaty.

However, the government still hasn’t determined the length of the extension that they will ask for. President Arias said he will travel to the U.S. to solicit the extension once all parties involved agree on a new timeline the length of time needed. This is making pro-CAFTA legislators a bit nervous, since the extension should have been solicited a while ago.

The entire Free Trade Agreement (known in Costa Rica as the TLC) was approved by a narrow majority of the Costa Rican population in an October Referendum. Opposition legislators and protesters have continued to slow the process of amending the 12 bills required to implement the trade agreement. Some legislators have refused to attend legislative sessions (including the entire PAC party), while others have piled up amendments or used other political stalling tactics to prevent them from making the Feb. 29 deadline.

Photo courtesy of La Nacion.

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Filed under: Costa Rica News on February 13th, 2008