Stand with Colombia
When: 7:00 pm to 8:15 pm, February 25, 2025
Where: Online
Stand with Colombia: Inside the global fight against corporate courts
With speakers:
- Guillaume Long, ex-Foreign Minister of Ecuador
- Cleodie Rickard, campaigner at Global Justice Now
- Sebastián Abad Jara, Interamerican Association for Environmental Defence
Multinational mining firms are suing Colombia to the tune of $13 billion. They are using ‘corporate courts’, which are written into trade deals such as the UK-Colombia investment treaty. These secretive tribunals protect the profits of overseas corporations at the expense of human rights and climate action.
But now Colombia is taking a stand against corporate courts, and it needs our help to scrap the UK-Colombia deal. Join us online as we launch our campaign on the UK-Colombia investment deal, and to hear directly from global south speakers struggling against this unjust and neocolonial system.
We’ll hear from Guillaume Long, ex-foreign minister of Ecuador who led his own country through the process of terminating investment treaties, and from Sebastián Abad Jara, a legal expert and researcher for the ecosystems programme at the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defence (AIDA). AIDA has been central to the struggle to protect Colombia’s fragile páramo wetlands, which has caused an onslaught of corporate court claims by mining firms. Finally, Global Justice Now campaigner Cleodie Rickard will set out the concrete actions we can take in solidarity from the UK.
