ISDS Courts
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Who do the Investor State Dispute Settlement courts, already a big part of the international trade framework and about to grow significantly with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, help? You may not be surprised that they serve the interests of the world’s largest corporations and wealthiest individuals.
Report authors Gus Van Harten and Pavel Malysheuski point out that the “legitimacy” of the ISDS concept “appears to depend in part on an expectation that it benefits smaller businesses, not just large multinationals and the super wealthy.”
But that doesn’t appear to be the case. Virtually all of the financial benefits of the ISDS have gone to the rich and powerful. Nearly 95 percent of all award money went to giant corporations or extremely wealthy individuals.
The ISDS industry scored big too. The authors found that ISDS “lawyers, arbitrators, experts and other actors” had earned an estimated $1.7 billion from these hearings by the spring of 2015.
The statistics in the Osgoode study are startling at times. Those “extra-large” corporations of $10 billion or more in revenue won 70.8 percent of the time, while others were only successful 42.2 percent of the time. They won in the “merits” stage of their hearings 82.9 percent of the time, versus a 57.9 percent success rate for everyone else.
The ISDS process has received relatively little attention in this country, perhaps because the United States has fared better than many other countries in ISDS hearings.
Reading this report, it’s not hard to understand why. Most of the countries that signed deals like NAFTA don’t have as many billion-dollar corporations and highly-wealthy individuals as the United States does. As this report shows, that means their oligarchs and companies are less likely to win big through ISDS.