03.03.2016 - 17:51 [ Techdirt ]

Canada Agrees To Use EU‘s ‚Lipstick On A Pig‘ Version Of Corporate Sovereignty For CETA

Last September, Techdirt reported on the EU‘s plan to replace the highly-controversial corporate sovereignty provisions in TAFTA/TTIP — the „investor-state dispute settlement“ (ISDS) chapter — with something it called the „Investor Court System“ (ICS). As we reported then, even if ICS addressed all the problems of ISDS — spoiler alert: it certainly doesn‘t — there was a huge backdoor in the form of CETA, the trade deal between the EU and Canada. If CETA includes old-style corporate sovereignty provisions, US companies with subsidiaries in Canada will be able to use CETA to by-pass TAFTA/TTIP‘s new ICS system completely, and sue EU nations using ISDS with all its widely-recognized faults. In fact, Bernd Lange, the MEP with responsibility for making recommendations on how the European Parliament (EP) should vote on international trade matters, said at the time that he would not support CETA if it included ISDS.