This is dystopian stuff. Under an innocuous title, the Arbitration (Amendment) Bill, what is being proposed is a fundamental challenge to democracy, sovereignty and people’s environmental and labour standards. What the Government is proposing to do, in darkness, is to sign Ireland up to a parallel justice system. This is not a justice system that the Minister of State and I can access; it is a justice system only for corporations. That is what is proposed and that is what CETA is about, or at least that is what the investor court system – the renamed investor-state dispute settlement mechanism – is about. It is a parallel justice system accessible only by corporations for corporations to sue states if they intervene and interfere with their legitimate expectation of making profits. That is what this is about. It deserves a national debate and national outrage. We should actually be having a referendum on it because the results of this could truly be catastrophic. I have been fighting this for more than a decade. I was in the European Parliament at the beginnings of CETA. I was involved in organising with civil society organisations across Europe, and also ordinary people, trade unions and civil society groups in Canada, warning about what this was, and now the Government is attempting to push this through. This paves the way not only for investor courts, or the parallel justice system for corporations only, as part of CETA but also for private investor courts as part of every current and future trade agreement that the Government will sign us up to in respect of which it seeks such courts. Contrary to what the Government is saying now, this could well include Mercosur in the future. The Bill is deliberately drafted in such a way as to ensure the Government will never have to hold a referendum on investor courts ever again. The whole point of this seemingly innocuous technical Bill is to avoid having to consult the people. Why? It is because the Government knows that if it suggested setting up a parallel system whereby corporations could sue states outside the regular judicial process, it would not win a referendum on it. Investor courts are completely against the public interest. They are rigged, private courts, designed to take the side of private investors against elected governments and to put profits before people every single time. The Minister earlier claimed at length that the investor court system, ICS, is substantially different from the investor state dispute settlement, ISDS. This is simply not true. This is just a rebranding of ISDS as ICS because its brand was so toxic. The Minister of State does not have to take my word for it. Listen to the expert advice of Comhlámh, Christian Aid, ActionAid and Trócaire, which have researched these issues extensively and concluded that the investor court system is a rebranded version of ISDS that offers a few cosmetic changes but which does not different fundamentally from ISDS. They are not making it up. They are able to see through the corporate spin that it suits this Government and the European Commission to inflict on us. According to the United Nations, ISDS or investor courts have awarded corporations the equivalent of the combined GDP of 45 small and poor countries. The average award is €250 million but awards of €1 billion or multi-billion euro awards are not uncommon. I will give some examples of what the Government is trying to sign us up for. In the Woodhouse Investment case, the UK is facing a claim from a company which invested in a proposed coal mine in Cumbria which was cancelled when the British High Court ruled against it on climate grounds, and it is looking for compensation for that. In 2024, ExxonMobil launched an ISDS case under the Energy Charter Treaty against the Dutch Government as part of a set of arbitration cases demanding billions of euro for its decision to phase out gas exploration in Groningen in the Netherlands. A fossil fuel company, Klesch Group Holdings Limited, is suing the EU, Germany and Denmark for at least €95 million over windfall taxes under the Energy Charter Treaty. In EcoDevelopment v. Tanzania, a Swedish investor sued Tanzania when the land title for a sugar plantation that never got off the ground was cancelled by the government. The company won a payout under this process of more than three times its original investment. The Egyptian Government was sued under an ISDS process because it proposed to increase the minimum wage. The Uruguayan Government was sued by the tobacco industry because it tried to put in better health warnings. This is about giving corporations the power to get massive amounts of money from states and chill progressive legislation into the future. Basically anything at all is counted as expropriation under CETA and how it is interpreted. I go to annex 8-A, which defines expropriation. It states that if you have direct expropriation, which is the term that we would know it as, there is a slam-dunk case for compensation, but also, "indirect expropriation occurs if a measure or series of measures of a Party [that is, a country] has an effect equivalent to direct expropriation, in that it substantially deprives the investor of the fundamental attributes of property in its investment, including the right to use, enjoy and dispose of its investment, without formal transfer of title or outright seizure." What could that look like? If we introduce rent controls that actually bring rents down, a Canadian investor, under this, can now sue the Irish State. That is indirect expropriation - the investor had an expectation when it invested because the Government told the investor it would be able to continue to jack up rents as much as it wanted, and now its legitimate expectation of making this profit has been cut across by the Government's action, so the investor will sue. The investor might be investing in liquefied natural gas terminals because the Government has given the go-ahead for that, then when a future government comes to power and says this is of course madness and there is to be no more fossil fuel infrastructure, the investor can now sue the Irish State. It would not be in the Irish courts, which is a crucial point, but in parallel courts accessible only by corporations. It would sue the Irish State there for billions in lost revenue because of indirect expropriation. This is a recipe for fossil fuel companies in particular to stop states from doing what is necessary to save the planet for all of us for a liveable future. Fossil fuel companies should be paying us billions for wrecking the climate, not us paying them, but instead these twisted courts allow them to demand compensation from us for not being able to cause even more storms, floods and devastating heatwaves around the world. It is outrageous that our Government wants to entangle us further into this warped system by expanding investor courts to more international agreements. We are already in deep enough trouble with the Energy Charter Treaty investor courts without handing more multinationals an even bigger blank cheque, which is what is enabling them to sue us in a variety of other investor courts will do. The Government is presenting this Bill as only applying to CETA and an EU trade agreement with Chile. It says not to worry because it will only apply to Canadian and Chilean companies, but all a big US multinational has to do to avail of CETA's investor courts is to go through a subsidiary in Canada. If it does not already have a subsidiary in Canada, it can open a subsidiary in Canada and then take a case. Let us say a future left government wants to prioritise renewable energy for people's needs, not AI, so it says we are going to stop having more and more data centres. Passing this Bill can mean that Canada, Google, Amazon or Microsoft can sue us for any future loss of earnings as a result. They can sue us for taking climate action in the interests of people and the planet. What is to stop any multinational for suing us for loss of profits under CETA if we decide to impose windfall taxes or make any changes to corporation tax in the future? The Government is effectively trying to condemn us forever to be its model of a corporate tax haven, a vassal state for US multinationals. The impact of that is not just in the cases themselves. It is not just in the potential billions of euro that the public could be forced to pay to these corporations in unfair, rigged, non-court judicial processes. It is also about the chilling effect. This is putting limits on our democracy into the future. The Energy Charter Treaty, for example, has a 20-year withdrawal clause, so even if we got out of it tomorrow, which we should, we are still stuck with it for another 20 years. They can still take court cases under it for another 20 years. Other international treaties and courts have similar clauses. CETA is even worse, because once we ratify it, which we do not have to since trade is currently happening with Canada, we can only leave if the entire EU does. It is an extremely high and undemocratic barrier that gives every other European country a veto over our future. There is no oversight here. The Government is claiming that this legislation complies with the Supreme Court judgment because it found that ratifying these courts would be unconstitutional, but there is no meaningful oversight here. A multinational can choose to sue us in any other country to evade this. They can just sue us in a different country that is also signed up to investor court systems and the Irish courts have no oversight role whatsoever. What a joke. We need to stop this.
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It is the Irish law versus CETA.
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That is not true.
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There is.
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Indirect expropriation.
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