and rewarding rapacious corporations.
These types of actions by corporations nominally registered in Canada, the US or Mexico (actually multinational companies), usually come under Chapter 11:
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) includes an array of new corporate investment rights and protections that are unprecedented in scope and power. NAFTA allows corporations to sue the national government of a NAFTA country in secret arbitration tribunals if they feel that a regulation or government decision affects their investment in conflict with these new NAFTA rights. If a corporation wins, the taxpayers of the "losing" NAFTA nation must foot the bill. This extraordinary attack on governments' ability to regulate in the public interest is a key element of the proposed NAFTA expansion called the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
NAFTA's investment chapter (Chapter 11) contains a variety of new rights and protections for investors and investments in NAFTA countries. If a company believes that a NAFTA government has violated these new investor rights and protections, it can initiate a binding dispute resolution process for monetary damages before a trade tribunal, offering none of the basic due process or openness guarantees afforded in national courts. These so-called "investor-to-state" cases are litigated in the special international arbitration bodies of the World Bank and the United Nations, which are closed to public participation, observation and input. A three-person panel composed of professional arbitrators listens to arguments in the case, with powers to award an unlimited amount of taxpayer dollars to corporations whose NAFTA investor privileges and rights they judge to have been impacted.
http://www.citizen.org/trade/nafta/CH__11/Here is a link that lists all the actions taken by various companies against Canada, the US or Mexico up until 2004, it is quite an interesting read, imo (it is a pdf file):
Table of NAFTA Chapter 11 Investor-State Cases and Claims (Feb 2005)
http://www.citizen.org/documents/Ch11cases_chart.pdfIt is well past time, imo, for NAFTA to be scrapped, it only takes a 6 months notice to withdraw for a country to remove itself from NAFTA, and a REAL Fair Trade agreement to take it's place. Trade is going to occur between countries and a fair agreement makes sense but that agreement MUST be for the citizens of those respective countries and NOT a license to pillage poorer countries, break unions, etc, as is the case with NAFTA.