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Cato and Public Citizen: No parallel legal system for foreign corporations

Here's something you won't see every day: an op-ed jointly written by analysts at Public Citizen and the Cato Institute.  Often divided on issues of trade policy, we find common ground in opposing the proposed expansion, via the Trans-Pacific Partnership, of a shadow legal system for foreign corporations.  Read about it in today's The Hill.  Here's an excerpt:

Special courts for foreign investors

By Simon Lester and Ben Beachy

On the precipice of the biggest congressional trade debate in decades, a once-arcane investment provision has become a lightning rod of controversy in the intensifying battle over whether Congress should revive Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), also known as “fast track,” for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) calls this provision a system of “rigged, pseudo-courts.” The Republican leadership of the House Ways and Means Committee defends it as “a vital part of any trade agreement.”

But this is not your standard partisan congressional battle. Inside Congress and out, criticism and support for this parallel legal system, known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), crosses the political spectrum. Analysts with the Cato Institute and Public Citizen usually stand on opposing sides of trade policy issues, but we find common ground in opposing this system of special privileges for foreign firms.

The TPP would extend this controversial system, found in some existing trade pacts and investment treaties, to new countries and tens of thousands of new companies. Under ISDS, “foreign investors” – mostly transnational corporations – have the ability to bypass U.S. courts and challenge U.S. government action and inaction before international tribunals authorized to order U.S. taxpayer compensation to the firms.

Pacts with ISDS are often promoted as simply prohibiting discrimination against foreign firms. In reality, they go well beyond non-discrimination, and create amorphous government obligations that have given rise to corporate lawsuits against a wide array of policies with relevance across the political spectrum. Foreign corporations have used this system to challenge policies ranging from the phase-out of nuclear power to the roll-back of renewable energy subsidies. Nearly all government actions and inactions are subject to challenge, covering local, state, and federal measures taken by courts, legislators and regulators.

Take, for example, the recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings that companies cannot patent human genes or obtain abstract software patents favored by patent trolls. Foreign holders of those patents could use ISDS to claim that these decisions interfere with their patent rights and ask an international tribunal to order compensation from the U.S. government...

Click here for the full op-ed from The Hill

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Comments

Angel Guevara

Please, join and help european citizens associations that are against TTIP, as you are against TTP. It's a world's challenge. It's the other side of the same topic, our democracy is being stripped away by a handful of Citizens United-enabled billionaires and giant corporations.

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