#ISDS#PoliticalEconomy#Capitalism#Neoliberalism#Globalization: "ISDS settlements are truly grotesque: they're not just a matter of buying out existing investments made by foreign companies and refunding them money spent on them. ISDS tribunals routinely order governments to pay foreign corporations all the profits they might have made from those investments.
(...)
Governments, both left and right, grew steadily more outraged that ISDSes tied the hands of democratically elected lawmakers and subordinated their national sovereignty to corporate sovereignty. By 2023, nine EU countries were ready to pull out of the ECT.
But the ECT had another trick up its sleeve: a 20-year "sunset" clause that bound countries to go on enforcing the ECT's provisions – including ISDS rulings – for two decades after pulling out of the treaty. This prompted European governments to hit on the strategy of a simultaneous, mass withdrawal from the ECT, which would prevent companies registered in any of the ex-ECT countries from suing under the ECT.
It will not surprise you to learn that the UK did not join this pan-European coalition to wriggle out of the ECT. On the one hand, there's the Tories' commitment to markets above all else (as the Trashfuture podcast often points out, the UK government is the only neoliberal state so committed to austerity that it's actually dismantling its own police force). On the other hand, there's Rishi Sunak's planet-immolating promise to "max out North Sea oil."
But as the rest of the world transitions to renewables, different blocs in the UK – from unions to Tory MPs – are realizing that the country's membership in ECT and its fossil fuel commitment is going to make it a world leader in an increasingly irrelevant boondoggle – and so now the UK is also planning to pull out of the ECT."
"[Honduran President Xiomara] Castro has deemed the forum, called the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID, to be an illegitimate usurpation of Honduran sovereignty and has hit upon an elegant solution: She has taken steps to withdraw Honduras from ICSID."
Honduras Ratchets Up Battle With Crypto-Libertarian Investors, Rejects World Bank Court
After the Honduran president repealed a law granting unfettered authority to outside investors, the cryptoquistadors took the dispute to a World Bank arbitration court.
#ISDS#FossilFuels#ClimateChange#Mining: "Investors argue that ISDS protects them from arbitrary, discriminatory or unpredictable treatment in countries that might lack independent or competent judiciaries. It safeguards their “legitimate expectation” of regulatory certainty, proportionality and profit.
But investors and tribunals have also used this idea to preclude states “from taking action to address climate change, despite these actions being necessary and foreseeable for decades”, the UN report said.
The sums involved have mushroomed and can be jaw-dropping. One Singapore-based company, Zeph Investments, is suing Australia for A$300bn (£155bn) because its government turned down a proposed mining project; the company argues Australia breached free-trade treaty obligations that it relied on. In another case, Avima Iron Ore is seeking $27bn from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Faced with such claims, often “governments just capitulate,” Boyd said. The result is a regulatory chill, in which fossil fuel companies may “block national legislation aimed at phasing out the use of their assets”, as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted."
The UK and Japan are now the only countries unwilling to leave the Energy Charter Treaty - which allows private investors based in one state to sue the government of another state when it acts to combat climate change | Martin Brooks
@lightweight
> Investor State Dispute Services (ISDS) terms of the not-at-all Free Trade Agreement our gov't has signed us up to...this will help you understand how bad it is
When the NatLabs talk about defending the "rules-based international order", this is what they're talking about. China is not exceptional in its economic colonisation of smaller/ weaker countries through "aid". Corporate media is just more honest about it when they do it.
National governments trying to counter climate change are being sued by foreign companies for 'damages to investments'. Is it time to abandon ISDS, the legal mechanism being used for these claims? | Martin Brooks
My latest for @NWBylines looks at Investor State Dispute Settlement (which is part of the Comprehensive & Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) that the UK has just joined... #ISDS is not an uncommon element of #internationaltrade agreements (despite the EU cooling on them recently).
I conclude that ISDS 'is a window on how states have either facilitated, or been forced to facilitate, an expansion of the rights of #corporations'.