Key Points
Dozens of Democrats in Congress have been calling on the Biden administration to intervene in the Prspera case and to remove ISDS from the trade agreement on which the claim is based.. The ISDS system is a scam snuck into trade deals to allow large multinational corporations to bypass domestic courts and challenge legitimate public policies, with Honduras Prsperas claim as a prominent example, US senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, told Inside Climate News in a statement...
Dranias, Honduras Prsperas general counsel, said in a written statement to Inside Climate News that the Honduran government has committed many illegal and expropriatory acts against residents, businesses, and investors in Prspera ZEDE..
Speaking in Spanish, Castillo said the government should block companies from running clinical trials at Prspera, for example, or order construction halted at the 14-story tower, built largely after the ZEDE law was repealed.. Garcia, the presidential commissioner, insisted the ZEDEs are operating without legal authorization, but he acknowledged that the government has done little to enforce that perspective..
Honduras has long been dominated by the United States and its commercial interestsit is where the term Banana Republic was coined to describe the domination of the United Fruit and Standard Fruit companiesand the countrys fight against international arbitration comes as part of the leftist governments larger orientation away from its neighbor to the north.. In response to the ISDS claims, Honduras withdrew from a World Bank treaty that helps govern the system, though that decision does not affect existing claims and foreign investors can still lodge ISDS cases using separate, similar rules overseen by the UN and others..
Theyre talking about climate change and the impact of climate change, but when a government or a community or a population tries to defend their resources, they most likely are defeated in international courts that always prioritize the interests of the private companies, Torres said.. Multimillion- or billion-dollar ISDS awards would inflate Honduras debt, and if it tried to avoid paying, investors could move to seize any foreign assets the country holds and close it off from capital markets...
