Corporate courts
What are corporate courts?
Phasing out coal-fired power stations. Health warnings on cigarette packets. Raising the minimum wage. Protecting the environment from mining.
Just some of the laws big business has challenged using corporate courts – a secretive shadow legal system formally known as ISDS or investor-state dispute settlement.
Why do we need to stop the corporate court system?
These corporate courts are an elite legal system exclusively for global investors which can be written in to trade and investment deals. They allow corporations to bypass the national legal system and instead have cases heard in secretive tribunals, where the law is tailored to their interests and where arbitrators don’t have to balance the public interest, human rights or environmental concerns.
Across the world, taxpayers are forced to cough up millions which could be used for healthcare or education, to ‘compensate’ corporations for democratic decisions that protect people and planet. Often the threat of a case alone can also pressure governments to back down on important policies.
The global fightback
People are fighting back, and countries like South Africa, Ecuador and Indonesia have already ripped up these toxic deals. The movements against TTIP and CETA have exposed the illegitimacy of the corporate courts system and now it is vulnerable. Together with campaigners across the UK, Europe and around the world, we can ramp up the pressure and topple this system.
Our demands
In the UK, as the government reassesses trade and investment policy in a Brexit context, we have an opportunity to ensure that ISDS has no place in it. We are calling for:
- No ISDS in new and replacement trade deals
- Removal of ISDS in existing investment deals
