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Hi John,
This week, the Indian Prime Minister visited the UK to sign a newly agreed trade deal. What didn’t get over the line was the proposed investment treaty between India and the UK, given wrangling over the corporate courts at its heart.

The UK is pushing back on even the small reforms India has tried to make to corporate courts, revealing a thoroughly outdated position on this shadow justice system. While the terms of this deal are still up in the air, can you demand the UK government ends the tyranny of corporate courts?
Take action: no corporate courts with India ([link removed])
What’s the story behind these much-vaunted Bilateral Investment Treaties, teed up as economic salves by our leaders? It goes back to the convulsions of an old world coming undone.

In colonised countries, Western companies were able to use the brute military force of their home countries being occupying powers to protect their investments. As countries liberated themselves from colonialism in the mid-20th century, Western businesspeople got together to dream up a new legal regime of investment treaties as a tool to maintain economic control.

Corporate courts were designed as a bespoke legal system for investors, and investment deals reconceived as enforceable contracts that could be invoked to sue countries if they dared to take back control of national assets or even tinker with them through regulation. They formed a defence against novel ideas advocated for by global south countries, which sought the rights and freedom within global economic rules to independently develop their industries and tackle poverty.

Sold as the path to economic security, investment treaties were signed by poorer countries amid the fallout of colonial violence and under the duress of debt crises. At first almost all were signed by a Western power and a former colony – India signed its first ever investment treaty with Britain in 1994.

Fast forward 10 years, and the Indian public purse had been hit by 30 claims – eight by UK companies – under the 1994 treaty that it then terminated in 2017. It's now in the top 10 of states responding to the most corporate court cases. So, India scrapped many of its investment deals and developed a new ‘model’ treaty to better protect its right to regulate against excessive privileges for foreign investors.

One reform was requiring investors to exhaust local remedies – that is, actually go through the national legal system of the country they are operating in with their disputes – for five years before resorting to unaccountable corporate courts. Now that a new investment treaty is on the cards, the UK is pressurising India to row back on even this limited reigning in of corporate courts.

But with negotiations stuck, it seems India is not yet willing to concede – giving us an important window to tell the UK that we want no corporate courts in our name, with India or any other country.

These secret tribunals imperil the policies we all need to tackle the climate crisis and deliver functioning public services, putting both the UK and our trading partners at risk of costly claims by fossil fuel and other big corporations. Can you add your name to the demand for change?
Tell the UK: call time on corporate courts ([link removed])
In solidarity,
Cleodie Rickard
Trade campaigner at Global Justice Now
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