How The Pacific Rim Arbitration Case Is A Preview Of The Trans-Pacific Partnership
El Salvadorian activists traveled to D.C. this week and protested on March 19th against a lawsuit brought against their government by OceanaGold’s mining company Pacific Rim. The lawsuit aims to recoup over $300 million in potential lost revenue after the company failed to obtain a mining permit. The case is being heard at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of investment Disputes (ICSID). NGOs including Oxfam claim that the lawsuit is an undemocratic attempt to force El Salvador to allow unsafe mining conditions which would hurt water quality.
The lawsuit comes as 11 countries, including the U.S., Japan, Peru, Australia and others consider Trans-Pacifica Partnership free trade agreement. The deal is far-reaching and touches on a lot of issues: net neutrality, healthcare costs, environmental degradation, and labor conditions are just a few of the areas of concern. As we wrote in a March 3rd article, the TPP has come under fire in the U.S. for the provisions on Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), a type of international corporate arbitration similar to the ICSID.
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"[Oceana Gold subsidiary] Pacific Rim filed a complaint against El Salvador in 2009. In 2012, the ICSID ruled that the case could proceed under El Salvador’s foreign investment laws—laws which have since been amended to prevent international companies from bypassing Salvadoran courts.
“Officials said that Oceana Gold’s subsidiary, Pacific Rim] failed to meet three key legal requirements for a mining permit: It failed to get government approval for its Environmental Impact Study (EIS); It did not submit a required feasibility study; and it was not even close to meeting the requirement that it held titles to (or permission to mine in) all the land for which it requested a concession.
“[OceanaGold] lobbied for a new mining law that it wrote and that would eliminate regulatory requirements it couldn’t meet. Having failed to push the law through, OceanaGold bypassed El Salvador’s democratically-elected government and initiated international arbitration to pressure El Salvador to pay for lost exploration costs and future profits.”
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http://www.latintimes.com/el-salvadorian-activists-protest-tpp-lawsuit-how-pacific-rim-arbitration-case-preview-303775
Yes indeed, just trust the President... and corporations and republicans.
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