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Conclusion

Human Rights Watch believes that the template could lead to major improvements in the workers’ rights protections contained in US free trade accords and commends those who have worked diligently on its provisions towards this goal. Nonetheless, we fear that failure to resolve the template’s troubling ambiguities with strong, clarifying labor rights language could leave labor provisions in pending and future free trade agreements vulnerable to narrow interpretation, to the detriment of workers’ human rights and contrary to the spirit of the template.