If the
Obama administration’s ambitious new trade agreements—the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership—are
ultimately ratified, what kinds of stories are we likely to hear from the world
of international trade?
In Washington State, a mining
company wants to expand a quarry. The local communities participate in the
environmental impact statement (EIS) process, and many residents object to the
project. Citing these concerns, the state government rejects the quarry
expansion. Is this participatory democracy in action? No, it’s the violation of
a foreign trade agreement. Because the mining company is registered abroad, a
panel of arbitrators rules that the U.S. government needs to pay the company
for the loss of profits it might have made had the expansion been approved.
In
Philadelphia, the city twice denies a permit to build a hazardous waste dump;
residents are concerned about threats of contaminated water. A new private
company buys the site and obtains federal and state licenses to build the dump.
Rather than wait for a city construction permit, it begins construction. The
city again denies the permit, citing the fact that construction had started
illegally without a permit, as well as environmental impact and public
opposition. Unfortunately, the company is a subsidiary of a foreign
corporation, and an international tribunal decides that the government needs to
pay back the company for its investment in the project, including the costs it
expended in the unlicensed construction.
Horror
stories? Fear-mongering from the likes of Senator Elizabeth Warren—or what
President Obama has dismissed as “law professor hypotheticals”? We wish that
were the case. But substitute Nova Scotia for Washington State, and Gaudalcazar,
Mexico, for Philadelphia, and these cases have already happened. In March of
this year, a NAFTA arbitration panel awarded Bilcon, a Delaware-based mining
company, damages because the Canadian authorities rejected its EIS for a quarry
expansion. This was not a particularly novel ruling; the case against Mexico,
which denied a construction permit for a hazardous waste facility in
Guadalcazar, was decided by a tribunal back in 2000.
These
results are the consequence of a procedure known as “investor-state dispute
settlement,” or ISDS. Thanks to the Obama-Warren debate over fast track,
this acronym has made an unlikely journey from the obscure world of
international arbitration to the headlines of major newspapers. But what is
ISDS – and why does it have us worried?
ISDS is an arbitration mechanism unfamiliar to many
legal academics and businesspeople, let alone the politicians and activists who
are now rapidly getting up to speed on its arcane details. In essence, it
allows multinational corporations that believe they’ve been harmed by
government regulation to sidestep the national court system and turn, instead,
to a panel of private arbitrators. Trade and investment treaties, such as NAFTA
and the proposed TPP and TTIP, grant multinationals the right to special
investment protections, including compensation when government regulation
affects their expected profits. Arbitration panels are empowered to decide on
the extent of the harm and the appropriate level of compensation.
Giving foreign corporations the right to sue
governments, including our
government, has many people worried. Senator Warren has pointed to a litany of
ISDS cases, including challenges to a minimum wage increase in Egypt and to
financial regulation in the Czech Republic, to argue against the current trade
deals. The White House has responded that these concerns are unfounded – and that
the investor protections in the TPP and TTIP merely provide the “same
protections” provided by U.S. law, and that arbitrators cannot force changes in
U.S. regulations.
Neither side is completely correct. But Warren is
right to believe that Americans should be very concerned about incorporating
this procedure in the trade deals
that will encompass most of the world’s economy.
Let’s take a look at NAFTA, rather
than the examples that Senator Warren has chosen, since the Egyptian and Czech
cases have arisen under different agreements, and have not yet been decided.
Anyone who suggests that NAFTA provides the “same protections” as U.S. law is
either unfamiliar with the law, or simply not telling the truth. Consider, for
example, NAFTA’s provision protecting companies from loss due to “indirect
expropriation.” Direct expropriation
is expropriation as normally understood – as the White House puts it, when the
government “takes its citizens’ property from them.” But indirect expropriation is a different concept altogether: it allegedly
occurs when government regulation hurts a foreign corporation’s expected
profits or increases its costs of doing business. Under U.S. law, such
“indirect expropriation” would be considered under the standards developed to
assess “regulatory takings.” These standards are, rightly, strict—since an
expansive view would make government nearly impossible—and they include looking
at a range of factors.
In NAFTA decisions, indirect
expropriation occurs when a corporation suffers a loss of a “significant part”
of its “reasonably-to-be-expected economic benefit.” And it is compensable if a
panel of arbitrators decides that the government’s action is not “proportional”
to the public interest rationales for its regulation, in relation to the
corporation’s economic harm.
The White House is thus correct to
claim that arbitrators cannot make a government change its regulation. But they
can force it to pay money to keep those regulations in place. That’s what
actually happened in the Guadalcazar case, Metalclad
v. Mexico, which was decided
under NAFTA. The arbitrators decided that even though the company had gone
forward with construction of a hazardous waste dump without a municipal permit,
they reasonably expected that permit to be issued anyway, despite the fact that
it had been denied twice before.
And this is only one of several
interpretations of “indirect expropriation.” Because there is no system of
precedent in ISDS, different arbitrators may come to different conclusions
without regard for previous rulings. The Metalclad
decision is one approach, but another – which also arose in a case against
Mexico – is even more worrying. Tecmed v.
Mexico was another case involving a hazardous waste dump, in which the
government had refused to renew a license to operate the facility. The
arbitrators decided that expropriation was present so long as the company
suffered a substantial economic loss due to the regulation, and that the
government’s action was not “proportional to the public interest
presumably protected” in relation to the company’s financial loss. (Bizarrely,
this proportionality test was borrowed from decisions of the European Court of
Human Rights.) While Tecmed was
decided under a different treaty, its proportionality test has since been
adopted by at least one NAFTA tribunal.
The Nova
Scotia case, Bilcon v. Canada, was
decided under a different NAFTA investor protection – the “minimum standard of
treatment” – but the analysis was similar to Metalclad. In both cases, a panel of arbitrators decided that the
corporation’s expectations were an
important factor in determining whether their rights had been violated. And, in
both cases, the arbitrators decided that the government needed to pay a foreign
company as the price of domestic environmental protection decisions. We are
confident that this would never have happened under U.S. law.
It isn't at all clear that these
cases would have come out this way under US law. Further, these cases are being
decided by a class of private adjudicators acting without precedent or public
accountability. ISDS puts private arbitration panels in the position of
deciding whether governments have chosen policies to protect labor rights,
public health, and the environment in a way that changes the expected profits
of multinational corporations—and whether those changes should be compensated. What
this means is that these agreements create a bias against new regulations,
including those in the public interest. Without these treaties, the U.S.
government would be free to regulate in any way consistent with the
Constitution – even if it were to diminish the expected profits of domestic or foreign
companies in doing so.
While these would be worrying
results for the United States, ISDS poses perhaps a greater risk to our foreign
allies. We already have a robust system of environmental, public health, and
labor protections, but many of our trading partners – especially the several
developing countries in the 12-nation TPP negotiating bloc – do not. They are
still working to write new laws as their economies develop. President Obama has
suggested that the TPP will help these countries bring their laws up to global
standards, but ISDS may, in fact, lead to the opposite result. Each new law
will be subject to challenge if it costs multinationals or reduces their
profits—and thus the very “catch-up” that proponents hope to stimulate may be
undermined.
Some
commentators have referred to this problem as regulatory “chill”—that governments
will be afraid to enact new regulations owing to the threat of ISDS
arbitration. Last year the New York Times
reported that Namibia has delayed implementing tobacco regulations due to such
threats. But regulatory “freeze” might be a more accurate description.
Regulations are effectively frozen at the time ISDS is enacted: everything that
happens after that might diminish an investor’s value becomes the basis for a
potential lawsuit.
While this concern about ISDS has
been raised by academic commentators—including celebrated economists Joseph
Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and over a hundred law professors and jurists—there
are other serious issues, which have not gotten enough attention in this
debate.
First, the
usual rationale for ISDS is that it increases investment where it is most
needed—in the developing world—by protecting foreign investors from undue government
interference. But by shielding the most powerful corporations from the normal
judicial system and putting them into a privatized, parallel track, ISDS may
take pressure off these countries to achieve judicial reforms that would benefit
everyone—foreign corporations and ordinary citizens alike.
With ISDS,
multinational corporations have no need to support the rule of law, because
they don’t need local courts. Likewise, governments that want to attract
investment don’t need to root out corruption and unfairness in their judicial systems
as a whole.
Second, ISDS rather obviously
threatens to undermine sovereignty by substituting ad hoc private arbitral panels for the decision-making of the
legitimate public authorities. But a recently proposed solution to this
problem—the creation of permanent courts of arbitration—would only compound the
legitimacy gap. An ad hoc panel
deciding cases that come before it may prove compatible with national legal
systems, particularly if future ISDS mechanisms specify that panel rulings may
be subject to appellate review by national bodies. But a “closed list” of
arbitrators constituting a permanent “Investment Court,” as recently proposed by
European trade negotiators, presents not a viable reform to ISDS but a far-reaching
transfer of sovereign power from national governments to a new supranational
body. Such a move may be consistent with recent European Union experience, but
not with American norms of self-government.
So why is
ISDS in Obama’s proposed trade agreements? To be clear, we don’t know what role
it will play in these agreements, as the drafts remain classified under a
national security provision—and it is only from leaks and the release of the
European negotiating draft that we know about the proposed ISDS. But there is
no doubt that U.S. negotiators are pushing to include ISDS provisions.
Some of the
enthusiasm for investor-state arbitration can be attributed to the success of a
different, earlier arbitration regime. Under a 1958 treaty, commercial
arbitration for cross-border disputes between companies has become extremely
widespread and highly effective. Such international commercial arbitration
(ICA) differs crucially from ISDS in that the parties under ICA are only
corporations, not entire governments and their attendant public policies. Nonetheless,
the success of ICA has boosted arbitration in the view of international
lawyers, who have sought to extend this success to the very different terrain
of foreign investment disputes.
But it would be naïve to place too
much weight on the success of ICA in explaining the current push for ISDS. The
real force behind this push comes from the interests of powerful corporations
and the politicians they influence. The current U.S. Trade Representative in
charge of shepherding these agreements through Congress, Mike Froman, is a
former managing director of Citigroup. The U.S. negotiating positions were
drafted with abundant input from over 500 “advisors” – 85% of whom represent
corporate interests – and it is unsurprising that they offer a corporate perspective
on ISDS.
It is now
up to the House of Representatives to decide whether it wants to keep special
rights for foreign corporations in these agreements. If the House rejects fast
track authority, Congress can exercise its discretion in choosing what it wants
to pass of any proposed trade deals. But even in granting fast track, it would
still be possible to keep ISDS out, via an amendment to specify the terms of
any future agreement.
In the recent Senate vote for fast
track authority, Senator Warren’s proposed amendment to prohibit ISDS was defeated.
But a new chance to stop ISDS will come up in the House debates. Legislation sponsored by Representative Mark Pocan
(D-WI) and co-sponsored by a dozen lawmakers would ban investor-state
provisions in future trade agreements.
It remains to be seen whether the
strange alliance of President Obama and the House Republicans will succeed in
pushing through these trade agreements—and, with them, a new legal regime for cross-border
corporate investment. President Obama has argued that the TPP is necessary
because “if we don’t write the rules, China will.” But with these special
investor protections included, the only rules that will get written are those
that pass muster with multinational corporations.
Marco Simons is Legal Director, EarthRights International. You can reach him by e-mail at marco at earthrights.org.