By Kim Da-ye
The chairman of the National Assembly foreign affairs committee put the Korea-European Union free trade agreement on the table Tuesday, amid protest from opposition party lawmakers.
The decision came, although fresh mistakes and typo errors were found in the trade pact.
This week, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MOFAT) re-submitted the motion to the parliamentary committee after correcting 207 mistakes that were found in its early edition.
At the committee meeting, lawmakers of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) demanded that the MOFAT re-summit the motion after correcting the newly found errors and mistakes.
But ruling Grand National Party (GNP) legislators insisted that members of the committee read the motion although it still has mistakes. They said those mistakes are not factual errors and that lawmakers should read and ratify it as soon as they can.
Earlier Korea and the EU agreed to make the trade pact take effect from July 1.
The ruling and opposition party failed to narrow the difference at the meeting.
Amid gridlock, Rep. Nam Kyung-pil of the GNP, chairman of the committee, put the trade agreement on the table after DP lawmakers left the meeting room.
The chairman warned the foreign ministry not to repeat the same mistake again, expressing deep regret over translation errors.
It remains to be seen whether DP lawmakers will be cooperative at the future committee.
The latest version is the third one that the ministry reviewed over a month and made all possible corrections after 207 translation errors were detected.
It has several mistakes. For example, it had the wrong interpretation of trade in “fair trade practice”, the omission of “or other light” in “laser or other light” and the omission of “X-ray”.
A local newspaper raised a suspicion over the difference between the schedule of concessions submitted to the National Assembly on April 6 and that posted on the website of European Commission.
The foreign ministry said that they are the same documents, but the one submitted to the Ntional Assembly had some parts erased while it was converted from an Excel file into a PDF.
It also found that the version on the European Commission website isn’t the final signed on Oct. 6, 2010, so the European authority replaced it with the final, signed copy in the late night Monday.