“Dirty last-minute deal” sees ISDS accepted by key European Parliament committee
In a significant omission, one of the European Parliament's key committees, INTA, has not called for the rejection of the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism in its TTIP report, which will be voted on by the full European Parliament on June 10. Although neither today's vote, nor the plenary next month, has any direct effect on the negotiations, it is regarded as an indicator of the mood of the MEPs, and of how any eventual vote on ratifying TTIP might go.
The second-largest party in the European Parliament, the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group, published a position paper on ISDS back in March, which said: "we have made it clear that we do not see a need for its inclusion and have called for it to be excluded when negotiations for the investment chapter start." It appears that S&D MEPs initially held onto this position in INTA, but as the result of what the Greens MEP Michel Reimon calls a "dirty last-minute deal" between the main political parties, they voted to drop all mention of ISDS from the committee's final report.
Instead, the text adopted by the committee speaks of trusting "the courts of the EU and of the Member States and of the United States to provide effective legal protection based on the principle of democratic legitimacy, efficiently and in a cost-effective manner," without specifying how that will happen if ISDS is available for companies to ignore those courts and to sue countries directly using secret tribunals.
The INTA report also speaks of building on a concept paper presented by Cecilia Malmström, the EU Commissioner responsible for trade and thus TTIP, in which she proposed some solutions for ISDS's problems. Finally, the report advocates setting up a new public International Investment Court, which would replace the current tribunal system.
The hemicycle of the European Parliament in Brussels.
