Paul Murphy: Warns Arbitration Bill Sets Up Courts for Corporations

This is dystopian stuff. Under an innocuous title of Arbitration Amendment Bill what is being proposed here is a fundamental challenge to democracy, to sovereignty, to people's environmental standards, labour standards etc. What the government is proposing to do here, in darkness in reality, is to sign Ireland up to a parallel justice system. This is not a justice system that you or I can access, no. It's a justice system only for corporations. That's what's proposed here, that's what CETA is about, or at least that's what the investor court system, the renamed investor state dispute settlement mechanism, that's what it is about. A parallel justice system accessible only by corporations for corporations to sue states if they intervene and interfere with their legitimate expectation of making profits. That's what this is about. It deserves to be a national debate, it deserves to be a national outrage, it's something we should actually be having a referendum about, because the results of this can truly be catastrophic. I've been fighting this for more than a decade. I was in the European Parliament when the beginnings of CETA happened, I was involved in organising with civil society organisations across Europe, with ordinary people, trade unions, civil society groups in Canada, warning about what this was. And now the government is attempting to push this through. This paves the way not only for investor courts, this parallel justice system for corporations only, not only for investor courts as part of CETA, but for private investor courts as part of every current and every future trade agreement that the government signs us up to and seeks for there to be such courts. Contrary to what the government is saying now, this could well include Mercosur in the future. The bill is deliberately drafted in such a way to ensure that the government will never have to hold a referendum on investor courts ever again. And the whole point of this seemingly innocuous technical bill is to avoid having to consult the people. Why? Because the government knows. Go to the people with the suggestion, we set up a parallel court system whereby corporations can sue states outside of our regular judicial process and you're not going to win that referendum. Investor courts are completely against the public interest. They are rigged private courts designed to take the side of private investors against elected governments to put profits before people every single time. The minister earlier claimed at length that the investor court system is substantially different from the investor state dispute settlement. It's just simply not true. This is just the rebranding of ISDS as ICS because its brand was so toxic. You don't have to take my word for it. Listen to the expert advice of Kolov, of Christian Aid, of Action Aid, of Trocra, who have researched these issues extensively, and conclude that the investor court system is a rebranded version of ISDS that offers a few cosmetic changes but which does not differ fundamentally from ISDS. They're not making it up. They're able to see through the corporate spin that it suits this government and the European Commission to inflict on us. According to the United Nations, ISDS or investor courts have awarded corporations the equivalent of the combined GDP of 45 small and poor countries. The average award is $250 million, but awards of a billion euros, awards of multi-billion euros, are not uncommon. I'll give some examples. This is what the government is trying to sign us up for. In Woodhouse Investment, the UK is facing a claim from a company which invested in a proposed coal mine in Cumbria, which was cancelled when a British high court ruled against it on climate grounds, and they're looking for compensation for that. In 2024, ExxonMobil launched an ISDS case under the Energy Charter Treaty against the Dutch government as a part of a set of arbitration cases demanding billions of euros for its decision to phase out gas exploration in Groningen in the Netherlands. Fossil fuel company Klesch Group Holdings Limited is suing the EU, suing Germany, suing Denmark for at least €95 million over windfall taxes under the Energy Charter Treaty. In Eco Development v. Tanzania, a Swedish investor sued Tanzania when the non-title for a sugar plantation that never got off the ground was cancelled by the government. The company won a payout under this process more than three times its original investment. The Egyptian government was sued under an ISDS process because it proposed to increase the minimum wage. The Uruguayan government was sued by the tobacco industry because they tried to put better health warnings. This is about giving corporations the power to get massive amounts of money from states and to chill progressive legislation into the future. Basically anything, anything at all, is counted as expropriation under CETA and the way it is interpreted. I go to Annex 8a which defines what expropriation is and it says it refers to direct expropriation which is the term that we would know it. If you have direct expropriation, it is a slam-dunk case in terms of compensation, but also indirect expropriation occurs if a measure or series of measures of a party, i.e. a country, has an effect equivalent to direct expropriation, in that it substantially deprives the investor of the fundamental attributes of property in its investment, including the right to use, enjoy and dispose of its investment, without formal transfer of title or outright seizure. What could that look like? Let's introduce rent controls. Rent controls that actually bring rents down. A Canadian investor, under this, can now sue the Irish state. That's indirect expropriation. I expected, when I invested, because the government told me that I'd be able to continue to jack up rents basically as much as I wanted. Now my legitimate expectation of making this profit has been cut across by your action. I'm going to sue you. I have, we're going to, I'm investing in liquefied natural gas terminals, because the government has given me the go-ahead for that. A future government comes to power, says no, this is madness, of course it is, no more fossil fuel infrastructure. We can now sue the Irish state, not in the Irish courts, this is a crucial point, in parallel courts, accessible only by corporations. I'll sue the Irish state there for billions in lost revenue, because this is indirect expropriation. This is a recipe for fossil fuel companies, in particular, to stop states doing what is necessary to save the planet for all of us, for a livable future. Fossil fuel companies should be paying us billions for wrecking the climate, not us paying them. But instead you have these twisted courts allowing them to demand compensation from us. Compensation from us for not being enabled to cause even more storms, even more floods, even more devastating heatwaves around the world. It is outrageous that our government wants to entangle us further into this warped system by expanding investor courts to more international agreements. We're already in deep enough trouble with the Energy Charter Treaty investor courts, without handing more multinationals an even bigger blank cheque. Which is what is enabling them to sue us in a variety of other investor courts will do. The government is presenting this bill as only applying to CETA and an EU trade agreement with Chile. Don't worry, they say. It will only apply to Canadian and Chilean companies. But all a big US multinational has to do to avail of CETA's investor courts is to go through a subsidiary in Canada. If it doesn't already have a subsidiary in Canada, you know what? It can open a subsidiary in Canada and then take a case. Let's say a future left government wants to prioritise renewable energy for people's needs, not AI. So it stops saying we're going to have more and more data centres. Passing this bill can mean that Canada, that Google or Amazon or Microsoft can sue us for any future loss of earnings as a result. Sue us for taking climate action in the interests of people and the planet. What is to stop any multinational from suing us for loss of profits under CETA if we decide to impose windfall taxes or make any changes to corporation tax in the future? The government is effectively trying to condemn us forever to be their model of a corporate tax haven, a vassal state for US multinationals. And the impact of that, it is not just in the cases themselves. It's not just in the potential billions and billions of euros that this public could be forced to pay to these corporations in unfair, rigged, non-court judicial processes. It's also about the chilling effect. This is putting limits on our democracy into the future. The Energy Charter Treaty, for example, has a 20-year withdrawal clause. So even if we got out of it tomorrow, which we should do, we're still stuck with it for another 20 years. They can still take court cases under it for another 20 years. Other international treaties and courts have similar clauses. CETA is even worse because once we ratify it, and we don't have to ratify it, the trade is currently happening with Canada, we don't have to ratify it. But once we do, we can only leave if the entire EU does. It's an extremely high barrier, an extremely undemocratic one, that gives every other European country a veto over our future. There's no oversight here. The government is claiming that this legislation complies with the Supreme Court judgment because it found ratifying these courts would be unconstitutional. But there is no meaningful oversight here. Multinational can choose to sue us, for example, in any other country to evade this. They can just sue us in a different country that is also assigned to investor court systems, and the Irish courts have no oversight role whatsoever. What a joke. We need to stop this.