However, the consolidation of Turkey's position as a transit country brought with it debates on it becoming a “passive transit country.”The subject of energy pipelines and transit transportation stems from the fact that supplier countries in the South and East are too far from the main consumer countries located in the Far East and West and therefore need to transport their energy products to consumer countries via other countries.
In transit pipeline projects, risks related to the transit country tend to emerge. The transit country may not allow the construction of pipelines in the country, may demand high transit fees, may withhold crude oil or natural gas passing through the pipeline for its own use or only allow use of resources according to its own supplier interests.
While the main goal of the buyer is to get cheap, stable and reliable energy resources, the main goal of the seller is to enter a market where it can directly sell its resources to buyers. In both cases, transit countries appear to be an obstacle. It is for this reason that both buyer and seller countries want to create a regime that will eliminate transit countries to the greatest extent possible and allow them to reach their own goals.
The Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) is the first international agreement that deals with issues of transit in the energy sector and seeks to establish a balance between the control rights of states and the international trade rights of other states.
The Draft Transit Protocol, which was designed to supplement the ECT, handles the issue in detail and grants new transit rights. While the parties that signed the agreement were still debating the Transit Protocol, Switzerland made a change proposal to article five of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) during the Doha negotiations. This change proposal, which seeks to include products transported via pipelines and other fixed facilities into the scope of transit, made the issue regain importance.
On the other hand, there are efforts to expand the scope of the principle related to transit. There are efforts to expand the scope of Article 5 of the seven-article GATT to 23 sub items. In the event that the proposal is approved, rights in addition to the rights envisioned in the Draft Transit Protocol will be valid with respect to pipeline and transit transportation.
A closer analysis of these mentioned arrangements reveal that there is an effort to create a regime that does not sufficiently consider the position and problems of transit countries but closely takes into account the interests of buyers and sellers as well as an effort to impose this regime onto transit countries. It is believed that practices that lack looking at issues from the perspective of transit countries will not be beneficial and have negative effects on international trade in the long run.
Legal regimes that don't take into consideration the problems of transit countries and that don't want to give them any share of the profit from the transaction between the buyer and seller will eventually make transit countries unwilling to build pipelines. While supplier and consumer countries try to maximize their own interests, they need to also contemplate whether they can develop a model that pays regard to the concerns of transit countries and protects international trade in the long run by removing transit country-related risks.
With regards to principles of allowing and preventing transit passage and prohibiting discrimination, international agreements on energy transit grant certain protections to the buyer, seller and even to the operator of the pipeline. In this way there is an effort to create a regime in which transit countries cannot benefit from the pipeline in any way and can only charge a reasonable transit fee for services. When we take into consideration the historical developments on energy transit transportation, we see that by setting up a regime that maximizes the interests of supplier and buyer countries, there is an effort to create a passive transit country model.
