© Michael Kappeler/Agence France-PresseActivists work on a float showing Angela Merkel lighting a TTIP-bomb during a demonstration in Berlin, 9 October 2015
The clause in the EU-US trade contract will threaten our right to health, a decent wage and a healthy environment
"A revolution against the law"
That's how UN independent expert Alfred de Zayas describes the controversial and increasingly used 'investor-state dispute settlement' mechanism which enables corporations to sue states for lost profits -
including those yet to be made.The UK government want this 'corporate court' included in the secretly negotiated EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (
TTIP). This is despite widespread public opposition that resulted in the biggest ever response to a European Commission public consultation: 97% of people called for investor-state dispute settlement to be removed from TTIP.
TTIP is promoted as being focused on the
"shared values" of the USA and EU, including "upholding and promoting human rights". However,
the USA and EU prefer to protect corporations from human rights law; they were the strongest opponents of a UN move to create a binding mechanism for holding corporations accountable to international human rights law supported by 80 countries and 400 organisations.In June, an unprecedented 10 UN independent experts released a joint statement outlining their fears for human rights in the 'new generation' trade deals including TTIP.
So, in honour of Human Rights Day, here are three ways that investor-state dispute settlement cases have led to the trading of human rights for profit.
Comment: Is Bonino correct when she says 'selfishness' created this problem? First, a little perspective:
When the people fleeing NATO's wars in Africa and the Middle East began entering Europe, the EU panicked. After all, for the past decade and a half the West had been inundated with horror stories about those 'Muslim extremists' and their 'evil dictators' - that was, after all, NATO's excuse for waging a war of genocide against some of them. That was their rationale for erasing their cultures and turning their countries into wastelands.
Years of failed economic policies, bailouts, ridiculous anti-Russian sanctions, a mushroom cloud of debt, and thievery at the highest levels has left the West in dire economic straits. As the EU is currently configured, it could not possibly handle such a huge influx of people. But they had to do something, and so they began herding the refugees into camps. Still, fueled by decades of xenophobic propaganda, Europeans began voting en masse for
Neo-Nazi'Far Right' politicians to 'solve' this apparently insoluble problem. To be honest, to the clueless public the refugee crisis must have looked like an invasion. So they were sitting ducks for 'Far Right' propaganda. Those with a humanitarian spirit still stuck to the 'official narrative,' and so they were no match for the mass fear that spread along with the official narrative of lies and racism.So, the honorable EU Chief calls this 'selfish'. Well, not sharing the last cookie in the kitchen is selfish. So is being inconsiderate of others' feelings. But destroying a people's culture and homeland, funding terrorists who ransack their towns, and then corralling them into pens while simultaneously voting for violent
Nazi'Far Right' parties that promise to 'take care of the problem'? This is is a level of evil that hasn't been witnessed since World War 2, and it shows no signs of easing up.See also: