This proposal aims to prevent foreign corporations from bypassing domestic courts and challenging regulations pursuing public interest objectives that threaten corporate profitability. Embedded in thousands of trade and investment treaties, ISDS mechanisms allow foreign investors to sue states before international arbitration tribunals for policies that may reduce their investment profits – in some cases, even when such national policies are non-discriminatory and enacted in public interest. The UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment warned in his 2023 report to the UN General Assembly that foreign investors “use the dispute settlement process to seek exorbitant compensation from States that strengthen environmental protection,” with fossil fuel and mining corporations alone already having secured over $100 billion in awards. The resulting regulatory chill constrains states, particularly in the Global South, from pursuing ambitious climate policies, phasing out fossil fuels, or fighting poverty. In response, the Roadmap proposes an end to ISDS and encourages the withdrawal of Global South nations from this asymmetrically designed mechanism. Several countries, including South Africa, India, Indonesia, Ecuador, and Bolivia, have already terminated or lapsed investment treaties containing ISDS provisions after concluding that these arrangements did not align with their national interests. As this Roadmap was being finalised, 220 prominent economists and legal scholars wrote a letter to the Colombian government, emphasising this proposal, and urging withdrawal from ISDS. These instances provide openings that should engender collective action by other Member States.
These proposals share a common objective: to give agency to Global South governments to take action and pursue independent development strategies oriented toward human needs rather than external demand, and to transform the background conditions in which sovereignty can be exercised. These proposals recognise that redistribution within national boundaries will require removing the external strings that are obstacles to the transformative domestic agendas driven by local movements.
