Trade deal dispute provisions need “reforming”

The EU Commission has no intention of excluding Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions from the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) despite the fact that 97 percent of the 150,000 responses to a public consultation opposed them.

A story in The Parliament Magazine said the EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström had told a hearing in the European Parliament that the consultation was “not a referendum”.

She did concede, however, that the ISDS provisions needed “reforming”.

The commissioner was summoned before parliament’s international trade committee for a discussion on the ISDS mechanism, widely seen as the most controversial aspect of the free trade deal currently under negotiation with the US.

Many fear the inclusion of ISDS in the agreement will result in foreign companies endlessly suing EU governments for legislative actions.

Malmström said that 1,400 bilateral agreements signed by European governments had ISDS in some shape or form.

In the eyes of the Commission, this was a question of how, and not whether to include ISDS in the transatlantic deal.

The commissioner made specific suggestions, but was keen to emphasise that these were preliminary ideas to be discussed further.