Korean companies could sue our governments over health or environmental legislation under the Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement (KAFTA).
Take action! Click on your state to send an email asking your Senator to vote against the KAFTA implementing legislation:
After three years of negotiations, the push is on to finish. We must ensure that our health, environmental and other laws are decided through democratic processes, not secretly signed away in a trade agreement. Read on to find out how you can take action.
Canadian economist and friend of AFTINET Jim Stanford writes from a Canadian perspective about the dangers of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in trade deals. Canada has been sued some 35 times, for claims totalling into the many billions of dollars, and may be the country which has been most targeted by these clauses.
Stanford writes, "the ISDS system is another potent club with which business can intimidate governments into accepting their economic and political dominance — and punish those which do not."
Devex writer Lean Alfred Santos reports on AFTINET and AID/WATCH's fears around the PACER-Plus trade negotiations in an article titled "PACER-Plus - Boon or Bane for Pacific Island States?"
31/07/2014
AFTINET is a small organisation with a tiny budget but we achieve a lot – we’ve had stories published in the mainstream media, held events and led campaigns which have resulted in more than 80,000 people signing petitions. We can’t do any of this without our members, who provide all of our funding and help spread our message.
120 academic experts in trade and investment law, EU law, international law and human rights, constitutional law, private law, political economy and other fields have spoken out against planned provisions on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
This adds to the growing opposition to ISDS worldwide.
View full text and list of signatories here
22/07/2014
The G20 Trade Ministers met in Sydney this weekend. We teamed up with the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association to perform some street theatre in Circular Quay which send the strong message for fair trade in deals like the TPP.
21/07/2014
The Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement (KAFTA) enables Korean miners to sue states over environmental regulation. Korean companies own three of the most controversial mining projects in NSW.
As Canada hosts a round of secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade talks, Stephen Cornish from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has published an article in the Ottawa Citizen titled 'The TPP could be a blow to public health'.
