#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."
"Castro quickly and successfully moved to repeal the ZEDEs law in the face of intense bipartisan U.S. pressure to maintain them. The American response has been to repudiate the very idea of Honduran democracy and sovereignty, with investors using the World Bank’s ICSID to force the new Honduran government to respect the policies carried out by the former president now sitting behind federal bars."
"In its case before the ICSID, Próspera retained a top lobbying firm, employing former Democratic lawmaker Kendrick Meek, to pressure Honduras to pay up."
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."
@glynmoody and this only talks about the immediate environmental effects (destroying fishing & local fishing villages, killing endangered animals, destroying local beaches) but the seabed is also a huge carbon sink. Anything that messes with that has bonus climate change effects.
@glynmoody@morlando I'm more familiar with the north-south story of the US putting ISDS into several generations of trade deals and attempted deals with Canada and Mexico.
The authors (often industry organizations copy and pasting legal text into trade agreements) and US supporters were quite explicit about what Glyn said, that it was tool for them to use, not a tool that others could use against them.