Photo: Tar sands
I rarely find anything dealing with climate change that I’ve never heard of before and something so absolutely horrifying. A secretive arbitration process open only to big business, leaves countries with no right to appeal. These “corporate courts’ were created by rich countries and oil multinationals in the 1950s to protect Western interests against the decolonization sweeping the world. The ISDS (“investor-state dispute settlement”) creates a “corporate court”, allowing multinational corporations from a trade partner country to sue a government in a tribunal for any law or regulation deemed unfair. Cases are often heard in secret, overseen by corporate lawyers who need not worry about their decisions’ effect on society, human rights or the environment—only investment law. These “courts” usually have no right of appeal, and can only be utilized by foreign investors. For example, Biden’s administration is being sued for cancelling a deeply controversial pipeline due to bring hundreds of thousands of barrels of tar sands, one of the most polluting fossil fuels, into the US from Canada. Biden’s decision is right—we absolutely have to stop exploiting tar sands. But the decision could cost him billions of dollars.
www.commondreams.org/views/2021/08/02/how-corporate-courts-impede-efforts-battle-climate-crisis