USTR Says No ISDS in US-UK Free Trade Agreement

By Melanie Foley

At a June 17, 2020 hearing of the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) asked the U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer an important question. Doggett, one of Congress’ leading critics of the controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) regime, inquired: 

Do you envision in the agreements that you're currently negotiating to maintain the progress that we made in the USMCA with regard to dispute resolution so that when we're dealing with a developed country like the United Kingdom, we rely on a mature legal system rather than a closed dispute resolution system following the precedent that you set in Canada and which is applied successfully in Australia?

The reply from Lighthizer, the administration’s top trade official, was one word: “Yes.”

In layman’s terms, this exchange confirms that ISDS will NOT be part of the U.S.-United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that is currently being negotiated!

ISDS grants rights to multinational corporations to sue governments before a panel of three corporate lawyers. These lawyers can award the corporations unlimited sums to be paid by taxpayers, including for the loss of expected future profits, on claims that a nation’s policy violates their rights. Their decisions cannot be appealed.

With ISDS included in many trade and investment agreements, more than 1,000 ISDS attacks have been launched against climate, financial, mining, medicine, energy, pollution, water, labor, toxins, development and other non-trade domestic policies. Taxpayers have shelled out millions or even billions of taxpayer dollars to corporations in individuals ISDS awards. Some countries have revoked democratically enacted policies in order to reduce their payouts or settle a case. 

ISDS being off the table in U.S.-UK trade talks is a major victory for the vast, international movement that has been fighting ISDS for decades. It reinforces that the U.S. rollback of ISDS in the revised North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) represents a new U.S. policy that will carry forward. ISDS was largely eliminated in the new NAFTA. (The original 1995 NAFTA was the first trade pact to include ISDS.)

The United States has historically been a leading proponent of this system and forced it on its trading partners.

But public outrage over ISDS has been growing for years and was a significant reason why the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) could not get close to majority support to pass the U.S. Congress. The unusually large, bipartisan votes in the House and Senate for the new NAFTA set a new standard that to be politically viable, U.S. trade pacts can no longer include extreme ISDS terms.

One important part of Doggett’s question was that he specifically mentioned the ISDS provisions of the new NAFTA with respect to Canada. The new NAFTA totally eliminates ISDS between the United States and Canada, a change that goes into effect on July 1, 2023, three years after the new NAFTA went into effect. Between the United States and Mexico, ISDS is significantly scaled back. The revised pact eliminates the extreme investor rights relied on for almost all payouts, but allows a small group of U.S. oil and gas companies that have contracts with a specific Mexican government agency to still make claims related to those contracts using the most dangerous ISDS rights. Doggett clarified, and Lighthizer confirmed, that this will not be the approach with the United Kingdom.

Lighthizer did not comment on whether ISDS would be a part of ongoing trade negotiations with less developed countries. This is of note because Kenya started FTA talks with the United States just last week. Nearly 7,500 public comments were submitted to the U.S. government urging an approach to Kenya trade talks that puts people and the planet first, including by excluding ISDS.

And, the ISDS threats still looms large because there are thousands of existing agreements that include the corporate-favoring tribunals. Indeed, countries around the world are under a potentially devastating new ISDS threat. The law firms that profit enormously from the ISDS system have been advertising to multinational corporations about the lucrative opportunities to use ISDS to attack government actions to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

The law firms have specifically targeted pandemic policies such as restrictions on business activities to limit the spread of the virus and protect workers, requirements for manufacturers to produce ventilators, mandatory relief from mortgage payments or rent for households and businesses, measures to ensure access to clean water for hand washing and sanitation, and more.

Specialist law journals have speculated that “the past few weeks may mark the beginning of a boom” of ISDS cases.

That’s why more than 600 labor, consumer, environmental, development and other civil society organizations from around the world are sounding the alarm. These groups sent a letter in July to heads of government worldwide urging action to avoid this new ISDS threat. They outlined an array of practical steps governments could take to immediately suspend the use of ISDS over pandemic response measures, as well as to put an end to the risks of all ISDS cases forever.