<
https://jacobin.com/2023/11/honduras-international-law-isds-thiel-prospera-free-market-neocolonialism>
"You may not have heard of the area of international law known as
Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), through which private corporations
are able to sue governments that implement legislation that constrains their
profits. But this private parallel legal infrastructure is one of the greatest
threats to progressive governments all over the world.
If, say, a government attempted to force an international fossil fuel company
to clean up after an oil spill, or introduced measures to disincentivize
smoking, those governments could be sued by the fossil fuel and tobacco
industries respectively. And this is exactly what happened in the cases of
Chevron v. Ecuador and
Philip Morris v. Australia.
ISDS provisions are written into hundreds of bilateral investment treaties
(BITs) agreed between states, often on highly unequal terms. Wealthy states,
home to powerful multinational corporations, have worked outside of the
multilateral system to agree these treaties, pushing less powerful countries to
agree to the inclusion of ISDS provisions if they want access to markets in the
rich world.
This system of divide and rule has been disastrous for the Global South. BITs
include all sorts of regressive elements, from measures that enforce the
intellectual property rights of powerful corporations, to rules that prevent
states from regulating financial flows.
But no area of international trade is more dystopian than ISDS law. Just ask
the
Economist, which wrote:
If you wanted to convince the public that international trade agreements are
a way to let multinational companies get rich at the expense of ordinary
people, this is what you would do: give foreign firms a special right to
apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for
compensation whenever a government passes a law to, say, discourage smoking,
protect the environment or prevent a nuclear catastrophe. Yet that is
precisely what thousands of trade and investment treaties over the past half
century have done.
Right now, all over the world, there are 390 active ISDS cases — including
Honduras Próspera v. Honduras."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
