ISDS: The New Supreme Court

[Jefferson23]

Trade deals like the TPP, T-TIP, and TISA are solidifying a new legal structure called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), which allows multinational corporations to nullify national laws and overrule their supreme courts, including ours here in the United States

June 5, 2015

Transcipt:

THOMAS HEDGES, PRODUCER, TRNN: Right now in Washington there's an effort on Capitol Hill to ram the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, or TPP, through Congress. The Senate's already approved something called fast-track for the presidency, which gives the President the authority to shape and secure agreements without having to consult Congress before they're voted on.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA): By the time you, the American public, can read the deal your elected representatives will have lost the ability to use your input to help shape that deal. That sounds like a lousy arrangement to me.

But often lost in the political buzz is what the legislation actually says. That's partly because the deal's been negotiated in almost complete secrecy. But policy experts and activists are now saying that one thing is clear: the TPP accelerates a new system of international law, one in which the private multinational corporation can overrule the once sovereign supreme court of any country involved.

MELINDA ST. LOUIS, PUBLIC CITIZEN: So in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or in the TPP, it's being sold as a trade agreement, but really there's only a very small amount of it that has to do with what we think of as trade.

Melinda St. Louis is the international campaigns director with Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.

ST. LOUIS: What it really is is a mechanism to deliver special corporate rights.

She says that the deal instead enshrines the doctrine of corporate nationhood, whereby multinational corporations can sue governments to retrieve lost profits, even if those profits are theoretical. They do that through something called investor state dispute settlement, or ISDS.

ST. LOUIS: So it's not a court. And it is not bound by the types of ethics that we think of in a court system. So these are three private lawyers. One day they might represent a company that is suing a government, and the next day they may sit as one of these so-called judges on an arbitration panel.

in full: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13979