Colombia defends its sovereignty from the power of global corporations | Climate crisis

Trade agreements can allow international corporations to trample on the rights of governments in the Global South. This is the message from the Colombian government, which describes the effect of such deals as “bloodbath” for their national sovereignty. And now, to Colombia president Gustavo Petro said he wants to renegotiate the agreements his country has with the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom.

He has a strong case, as the US and European countries have also been renegotiating similar trade and investment deals in the past few years as they try to avoid being sued in the secretive “corporate courts” that create these deals.

Just this year, the British government pulled out of a toxic investment deal called the Energy Charter Treaty, following a spate of cases in which European governments were sued by fossil fuel corporations for taking climate action that allegedly hurt their profits. enterprises.

So the question now is whether European countries will accept that southern countries need the same political space to deal with climate change and the many other problems they face. Or whether they will demand that these countries continue to abide by these terrible, one-sided deals.

At the heart of the problem is something known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS. In essence, ISDS creates a “corporate court” that allows multinational corporations from a trading partner country to sue governments in an international tribunal.

These “corporate courts” have been involved in trade and investment deals since the 1950s, originally conceived as a way to protect Western interests in developing countries. They created a legal system that would make it difficult for governments that wanted to, say, nationalize oil fields owned by Western multinationals. So from the start these deals are implicitly neo-colonial.

But over time, the reach of these corporate courts was expanded by corporate lawyers. Today, corporations can sue almost any law or regulation they don't like. Worse, these cases are often heard in secret, overseen by corporate lawyers who don't have to worry about the impact of their decisions on society, human rights or the environment – ​​only investment law. And these “courts” usually have no right of appeal and can only be used by foreign investors.

As such, ISDS has been used by tobacco corporations to challenge governments who want to ensure that cigarettes are sold only in plain packs. They have been used to challenge increases in the minimum wage and windfall taxes. But increasingly they are being used to challenge any environmental regulations needed to stop climate change. In fact, they are becoming a major barrier to the climate action that governments need to take to keep our planet habitable.

As such, Western countries find themselves on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations simply for fulfilling their democratic duties. Not surprisingly, they are canceling the contracts that put them in this situation. But they are much less willing to allow other governments to take the same measures. One rule for us, quite another for the global south.

The Colombian government decided to expose this hypocrisy and take matters into their own hands. President Petro said that allowing corporations to settle disputes outside national courts should never have happened, saying instead that Colombia was being forced to “put ourselves in the wolf's mouth.”

He is right. In the past decade, 23 known ISDS cases have been filed against Colombia, many of which were issued by foreign mining companies in direct response to measures taken by Colombia to protect the natural environment and the rights of indigenous peoples.

Mining giant Glencore, for example, is suing Colombia after the country's Constitutional Court ruled to halt a proposed expansion of what is already Latin America's largest open-pit coal mine.

The Cerrejon mine has always met with fierce local resistance and has resulted in toxic contamination of air, soil and water supplies and the displacement of 35 indigenous communities from their ancestral lands. The Constitutional Court ruled that the expansion of the mine would seriously affect the ecosystem of the local community.

Glencore said the court's decision was discriminatory, unreasonable and arbitrary and used ISDS to file four separate cases against Colombia. It won the first case and was awarded $19 million, while the other three are still being fought for undisclosed amounts of money.

In a separate case, Canadian mining company Eco Oro claimed $696 million in damages when the Constitutional Court ruled to protect páramos, rare, high-altitude wetland ecosystems that serve as vital sources of fresh water. Although the ISDS system in question is expressly supposed to guarantee policy space to governments to protect the environment, the arbitral panel ruled that this environmental exception does not preclude the obligation to pay compensation.

Colombia is not alone. In recent years, countries including Kenya, South Africa and Ecuador have begun to emerge from this deeply undemocratic system. One of the first treaties Colombia wants to renegotiate is the UK-Colombia deal. Colombia's ambassador to the UK was unequivocal in denouncing the deal, saying these contracts “have become a drain on Colombia and many other countries”, pointing specifically to the power they give the fossil fuel industry to push back on action in the field of the climate and to sue countries “for failing to gain what they set out to gain through pollution”.

But they will meet serious resistance. This means they will need support from citizens and movements here in the UK. Fortunately, the very civil servants union working in the UK government to negotiate trade deals has already come out in support of Colombia's position, saying “we need real climate action”.

We must join them. ISDS is an arcane system, but in recent years activists have brought it out of the shadows and begun to dismantle it in numerous trade deals. Seventy years after the emergence of this neo-colonial system, we can finally defeat it. And if we want to stop climate change and build democracy, we need to do it fast. Colombia is now on the front line and needs our support.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.