IF YOU wanted to convince the public that international trade agreements are a way to let multinational companies get rich at the expense of ordinary people, this is what you would do: give foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever a government passes a law to, say, discourage smoking, protect the environment or prevent a nuclear catastrophe. Yet that is precisely what thousands of trade and investment treaties over the past half century have done, through a process known as “investor-state dispute settlement”, or ISDS.
Finance & economics | Investor-state dispute settlement
The arbitration game
Governments are souring on treaties to protect foreign investors
This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline "The arbitration game"
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