The 2015 Call for Action
In early 2015 a coalition of civil-society organisations, trade unions, farmers' organisations, youth and women's movements and indigenous groups issued a joint call for a global day of action on 18 April. It was published in 14 languages and drew 753 filed events across 47 countries.
What the Call Asked For
The document set out a position on the trade and investment agreements then being negotiated — TTIP, CETA, TiSA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership among them — and asked organisations and individuals to hold decentralised actions on a single day across the five continents.
Its substantive demands were narrower than the rhetoric around it suggested. The signatories asked that negotiating texts be released, so that parliaments and the public could read what was being agreed before signature. They asked that investor-state dispute settlement not be used to challenge environmental or public health regulation. And they framed both demands as questions of democratic oversight rather than of trade volumes.
The call explicitly welcomed a diversity of tactics, which is visible in the register: the 753 filed events run from press conferences and public hearings through information stalls, marches and rallies to symbolic actions.
International trade must be a tool for sustainable development and the protection of common goods, not a mechanism that undermines democratic sovereignty.
Who Issued It
The call was not the work of a single organisation. It was signed by trade-union federations, environmental and development groups, farmers' and food-sovereignty movements, digital-rights organisations and national anti-TTIP coalitions across Europe, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific. The supporting organizations are listed as a matter of record.
What followed is documented in the register of events. For the state of the agreements the call addressed, see the agreements reference and the TTIP timeline.
Why 18 April, and Why a Single Day
The date was chosen to sit immediately after 17 April, the International Day of Peasant and Farmer Struggle, which is itself a fixed date in the food-sovereignty calendar. Placing the trade action alongside it linked two constituencies that had been campaigning separately — farmers' movements concerned with agricultural chapters and market access, and urban campaigns focused on regulation and public services. The register shows the seam clearly: 46 records are filed for 17 April and 635 for 18 April, with several organisers filing across both days.
Concentrating on one date was a deliberate tactic rather than a convenience. A distributed campaign against a negotiation conducted in confidence has no single venue to target: there is no building, no vote and no public hearing to converge on. The negotiating rounds themselves rotated between Brussels and a different American city each time, and were announced weeks rather than months ahead.
A synchronised day of decentralised actions substitutes time for place. It produces a countable total on a single date that national media can report as one event, and it lets a small local group participate on its own scale — an information stall in a market town counts once in the register, exactly as a rally in a capital does. That equivalence is the mechanism: it converts geographic spread, which a distributed campaign has, into a single number, which is what a distributed campaign otherwise lacks.
That is why the register exists at all. The count was the point, so the organisers built a public map and asked participants to file their own entries rather than compiling the list centrally. The consequence is visible in the record: the fields are the ones a self-filing organiser would complete, the titles are in the organisers' own languages, and the precision of the entries varies because the people entering them varied.
How the Call Was Distributed
Distribution was the whole logistical problem. A call issued centrally has to reach organisations that share no mailing list, no common language and no obligation to reply, and it has to reach them early enough that they can book a venue or notify a local authority.
The text was issued in 14 languages — Arabic, Basque, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Galician, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovenian and Spanish — which is an unusually wide spread for a document of this kind and reflects the fact that the national coalitions, not a central secretariat, did the translating.
Distribution then ran through those national coalitions rather than through a single list. This is visible in the shape of the register: participation tracks where an organised Stop-TTIP or anti-TAFTA structure already existed, which is why 47 countries appear but six of them account for most of the records.
Questions About the 2015 Call
Who signed the 2015 call for action?
Trade-union federations, environmental and development NGOs, farmers' and food-sovereignty movements, digital-rights organisations, and national anti-TTIP and Stop-TTIP coalitions across Europe, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific. It was issued jointly, with no single organisation as author.
What did the call actually demand?
Two things, both procedural: that negotiating texts be published so parliaments and the public could read them before signature, and that investor-state dispute settlement not be available to challenge environmental or public-health regulation. Both were framed as questions of democratic oversight rather than of trade volumes.
Why was the day of action held on 18 April 2015?
To sit directly alongside 17 April, the International Day of Peasant and Farmer Struggle, linking the agricultural and urban campaigns. The register holds 46 records for 17 April and 635 for 18 April.
Did the call achieve what it asked for?
Partly, and not by its own action alone. Consolidated negotiating texts became public in 2016 through unauthorised disclosure rather than official release. The TTIP talks stopped that year and the mandates were withdrawn in 2019. On investment, the European Union did move away from ad-hoc arbitration to a standing court model, which was the substance of the second demand.