ISDS and coronavirus Pandemic: big business for transnational corporations
Public Services International (PSI) and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation are producing a series of four articles that investigate how free trade agreements, neoliberalism, and the lack of tax justice in Latin America have undermined the health and socioeconomic development strategies in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Comms
The first article, "Pandemic: Big Business for Transnational Corporations," exposes how the clauses contained in free trade treaties known as investor-state dispute resolution (ISDS) mechanisms allow large transnational corporations to take legal action against governments that have implemented emergency policies to fight the pandemic including: freezing and exempting water and energy bills; temporary control of private hospital beds; breaking patents to make medicines and tests more affordable; and policies to inject money into the economy.
This could result in losses of millions of dollars for Latin American states that are signatories to these agreements, restrict their ability to create new public policies and provoke the dismantling of public services.
