Why the TPP Must be Opposed at All Costs

[That Guy 888]

73. It really isn't, because your still talking about bilateral investment treaties NOT ISDS

You know, people would take your posts more seriously if you posted your source with your first post instead of playing the pro from Dover here to teach us ignorant savages how to make fire.

Now then, where in that article are the sentences:

There are currently more than 2500 BITs in force, involving most countries in the world.

and

The world's first BIT was signed on November 25, 1959 between Pakistan and Germany.

they're in this Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilateral_investment_treaty but not the economist article you linked to.

If you actually look at the bit between Germany and Pakistan, it at best is a proto-ISDS and that's being generous, no doubt to encourage the idea that there is a lengthy history of ISDS'. They seem to be protection/compensation from nationalization of assets owned or invested in by foreign nationals, and not protection from say, the results of internal environmental laws.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2014/534979/EXPO_STU%282014%29534979%28ANN01%29_EN.pdf

Many Western European states followed the example of Germany through the 1960s and 1970s, in part because of a wave of expropriations during the 1970s, while the USA followed in the 1980s. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new market economies in Central and Eastern Europe, combined with the growing willingness of Latin American countries to accept BITs led to a Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in the
EU’s international investment agreements rapid proliferation of BITs. The number of BITs in existence would rise from less than 400 in 1989 to approximately 2400 in 2004.
2.2
BITs and dispute settlement centres When the budgets of governmental aid programs stagnated in the second half of the 1950s, efforts were made to promote private investment in developing countries in order to foster development.
Political and non-economic risks appeared to discourage investors to invest in developing countries. Furthermore, investment disputes had been traditionally settled through interstate channels under diplomatic protection. This depended on the political will of a state to aid its nationals in case of problems with foreign investment and ultimately to espouse the claim of its nationals as its own.

Direct investor-state arbitration, making such espousal redundant, would only be included in BITs in the late 1960s. For this reason, during the late 1950s efforts were made to create a multilateral regime for the protection of private foreign investment, especially a mechanism of international investor-state arbitration.

In 1965, the OECD requested the World Bank to draft a Convention for an International Investment Insurance Agency. This did however not lead to the establishment of such Agency. As early BITs did not contain provisions on investor-state disputes the need for action continued to exist. Based onconsiderable experience the World Bank decided to continue to seek a solution for investor-state disputes, convinced that it would be easier to reach agreement on a procedure for dispute settlement than to reach agreement on international standards of treatment.

http://www.marietjeschaake.eu/2014/11/isds-whats-going-on/

In 1959, Germany became the first country to conclude a bilateral investment agreement when it closed an agreement with Pakistan. It is unclear when exactly the first ISDS clause was introduced, though the agreement between the Netherlands and Kenya of 1970 contains an early reference (article 11). By the ’80s ISDS clauses were common features in bilateral investment agreements. This clause allows a company, from either of the two countries investing in the other, to bring the government of that country before an international arbitration court if it believes it has been unfairly treated. This would be for example if property is expropriated or if a contract is broken. In most bilateral agreements, investors are granted access to the domestic legal system, while sometimes requiring investors to exhaust all local remedies before proceeding to international arbitration.

Weird that seems to suggest that the investor state dispute settlement wasn't in the original BIT of 1959.

It's been fun, let me know when you have more than one source, and not a source that quotes the same economist article, after all we're not republicans here, right?