The postponed TTIP trade deal debate is back on again, scheduled for next Wednesday (8th July). But there’s been a worrying new development in the form of a dangerous compromise over Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms.
ISDS mechanisms give foreign companies extra legal powers to challenge governments. In the past they have been used by companies to sue governments for increasing minimum wages, renationalising health services or protecting the environment.
Campaigning MEPs had been planning to press for a stronger European Parliament attitude to TTIP and to ISDS in particular, but now the amendments that sought to strike out ISDS have been replaced by a new compromise amendment, brought by the President of the European Parliament, and several European party groupings.
The deal’s backers say this ISDS-lite plan rules out the worst excesses of ISDS, but we’re concerned it leaves intact the fundamentally bad idea that foreign investors should get a privileged route to massive compensation payments when democratically-elected governments do something that, it could be argued in court, affects the profits of a multinational company.
Please can you help by writing to your MEPs again, calling on them to reject the dangerous new compromise on ISDS in Wednesday’s vote?
For more detail on why this ISDS-lite compromise is a bad deal, read this
