TTIP negotiations resume on Monday with ‘corporate courts’ issue taking centre stage

Date: 19 February 2016

The 12^th round of the negotiations for the proposed trade deal between the EU and the USA are due to start in Brussels on Monday.  The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations have encountered a range of problems, with a White House official recently admitting that the deal was unlikely to be reached while President Obama was still in office, and both parties looking increasingly at odds over the issue of ‘corporate courts’ – one of the main planks of the negotiations.

The investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism that is proposed under TTIP would enable corporations to sue governments in secretive, supra-judicial courts for bringing about legislation that would harm their profits. Negotiations on the investment chapter of TTIP are scheduled to restart during this round of negotiations, but ISDS has increasingly become the most controversial aspect of the whole deal.

• The European Commission has been massively taken aback by the strength of feeling about ISDS. They carried out a public consultation in 2014 and 97% of the thousands of response they received were negative.
• The controversy and strength of feeling against it has been continuous – at one point France was saying they wouldn’t sign TTIP if it was in.
• A UN human rights expert and academic called ISDS a ‘revolution against international law’
• The Commission was under so much pressure that in September 2015 they made a proposal for an alternative system that they’ve called ICS
• Civil society thinks it has all the problems of ISDS – that it was essentially a rebrand with all the same problems.
• US negotiators and business lobby are not keen at all on ICS proposal – they want the original ISDS in TTIP
• And in Germany (which has huge anti-TTIP sentiment – 250,000 people marched in Berlin against TTIP at the end of last year) biggest professional association of judges has said there is no need, or legal basis for the ICS proposal.
• Earlier this week Global Justice Now released new research that showed that companies had used ISDS in other trade deals to push back on tax matters on numerous occasions, showing that TTIP would make it more difficult for governments to bring about tax regulations that were unpopular with corporations.

 
Guy Taylor, the Global Justice Now trade campaigner who will be in Brussels during the negotiations said:

“It’s not surprising that the EU is suffering such a crisis of legitimacy in the UK when Brussels-based negotiators are engineering such an enormous corporate power grab. People across Europe have said in their millions that they don’t want corporate courts, they don’t want consumer standards and important regulations to be ‘harmonised’ to the lowest common denominator, and they certainly don’t want to see vital public services like the NHS locked-in to pathways of privatisation.

“Public pressure has made ISDS so controversial that it’s now threatening to derail the entire process. Just this last week we have shown what a huge threat a system of corporate courts would pose to countries who might want to make companies pay fair rates of taxation. At a time when we need to desperately reign in corporate impunity, TTIP would grant a whole new range of powers for companies to ride roughshod over governments and democracy.”