Thank you.
I'm going to read from a section of a letter that was sent to Congress in the United States. It's from 223 professors of law and economics. They urge Congress to reject the TPP and other prospective deals that include investor-state dispute settlement. That's the thing I have a major concern with. Here is some of it:
We therefore urge you to protect the rule of law and our nation's democratic institutions and sovereignty by rejecting this TPP as long as ISDS is included.
...ISDS grants foreign corporations and investors a special legal privilege: the right to initiate dispute settlement proceedings against a government for actions that allegedly violate loosely defined investor rights to seek damages from taxpayers for the corporation's lost profits. Essentially, corporations and investors use ISDS to challenge government policies, actions, or decisions that they allege reduce the value of their investments.
I have a comment on that. It seems to me that where it seems to be so broadly open that there's a huge loophole, we could be sued for bringing actions to address climate change, protecting the rights of indigenous people, and stopping human rights violations. But at the other end, it also seems that corporations could sue us because we didn't take any action on climate change, and because not taking action on climate change would threaten their future profits when we get to that point in time when we're screwed, when temperatures rise over four degrees or something like that, when sea levels rise, and there's deforestation and so on. I won't get into that.
They continued:
Through ISDS, the federal government gives foreign investors—and foreign investors alone—the ability to bypass that robust, nuanced, and democratically responsive legal framework. Foreign investors are able to frame questions of domestic constitutional and administrative law as treaty claims, and take those claims to a panel of private international arbitrators, circumventing local, state or federal domestic administrative bodies and courts. Freed from fundamental rules of domestic procedural and substantive law that would have otherwise governed their lawsuits against the government, foreign corporations can succeed in lawsuits before ISDS tribunals even when domestic law would have clearly led to the rejection of those companies' claims.