Salvadorans Warn Canadians about World Bank's Kangaroo Court
Salvadorans Warn Canadians about World Bank's Kangaroo Court
By: René Guerra
Published 16 May 2015
The company’s proposed gold mine would have used thousands of tons of cyanide and hundreds of thousand liters of water per day
In anticipation of an imminent ruling from the World Bank’s little known investor-state arbitration tribunal that could force El Salvador to pay Canadian mining firm OceanaGold US$301 million, a Salvadoran delegation is in Canada to discuss how this arbitration process threatens democratic decision making, public health and the environment here and beyond.
“As United Nations expert Alfred de Zayas recently expressed, the impact that investor-state arbitrations have already had and will have on human rights is very worrisome,” warned Yanira Cortez, Deputy Attorney for the Environment for El Salvador’s Human Rights Prosecutor’s Office, at an event in Ottawa this week. “We know that just the threat of these lawsuits can force governments in the Global South – and even here in Canada – to go against the public interest when it comes to health and environmental protections.”
Since May 11, Cortez and Marcos Gálvez, President of the Association for the Development of El Salvador, have been sharing how their country’s sovereign decision to halt large-scale mining on environmental grounds could be punished any day now by the secretive International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in Washington, DC. Gálvez's organization is also a founding member of the country's National Roundtable against Metal Mining.
They have also been reminding Canadians of the dangers they face through investor provisions in existing and proposed free trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Canada and European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).
More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Salvadorans-Warn-Canadians-about-World-Banks-Kangaroo-Court-20150515-0022.html