Campaign news

Corporate courts treaty under pressure as fossil fuel payouts continue

The campaign to persuade governments to exit the controversial Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) has been growing in recent months as talks to reform the treaty reached a decision point. The ECT, a giant ‘corporate court’ treaty between 50 countries specifically for the energy sector, is being used by fossil fuel companies to sue governments over things like phasing out coal power and banning fracking.

This August, UK oil company Rockhopper won over £210m from the Italian government over a ban on offshore oil drilling using the ECT – six times more than the company’s actual investment in the drilling project. Rockhopper’s share price immediately shot up, as the company is treating this win as a financial asset which will help it move on to open a new climate-destroying project drilling for oil off the Falklands.

Global Justice Now is working with groups all across Europe calling on our governments to exit the ECT. Spain and Poland have already said they’re leaving, the Dutch parliament has voted for exit and many others have concerns. At the same time though, there is a move to just greenwash the treaty with some weak reform proposals to ‘modernise’ it.

This so-called modernisation would actually give fossil fuel companies ten more years to keep suing in corporate courts, blocking climate action during the crucial next decade for energy transition. If the ECT continues to protect these projects for ten more years, there is a problem. Either governments will actually cancel them and the fossil fuel companies will sue, massively increasing the cost of the transition. Or governments will delay even longer to avoid being sued, at irreparable cost to the climate.

We’ve continued to raise the profile of this secretive treaty in the media, with MPs and reaching out to the wider climate movement. At the end of October we’ll be taking further action, ahead of a key ECT meeting in November. Alongside allies we’ll be protesting at government departments, calling on the UK to join with other countries in a coordinated withdrawal from the ECT.

Join the day of action:

globaljustice.org.uk/ect-action

A protest at the Energy Charter Treaty secretariat in Brussels.

A People’s Vaccine protest at the WTO ministerial in Geneva

Human cost of vaccine inequality clear as WTO fails again

Global Justice Now’s campaign to end Covid-19 vaccine monopolies stepped up in June ahead of a key decision-making World Trade Organisation (WTO) summit in Geneva. Shortly before the summit, we took our campaign to parliament, asking MPs to pledge their support for life-saving measures to suspend intellectual property. After a day of engaging conversations with politicians from across parties, we delivered their pledges by hand to the Department for International Trade. We also took to the media to warn that a system which can’t bend its pro-big business rules to allow for the rapid scale-up of medicines is simply not fit for purpose.

Throughout the pandemic, the UK has played a particularly damaging role when it comes to vaccine access around the world. It has failed on donation targets, binned hundreds of thousands of doses, and repeatedly blocked global south-led efforts to break up big pharma monopolies at the WTO. The UK government continued its wrecking efforts at the summit in June, ensuring that the deal that was finally reached was a pale reflection of what was needed.

But the fact a deal was reached at all shows global agreement that pharma monopolies have failed us. Realising this, lobbyists for the drug companies themselves came out in anger against the deal. While these corporations have already enjoyed a record-breaking pandemic windfall, the millions of dollars they pour into maintaining their monopolies are suddenly looking less effective. And if people didn’t already see how deadly corporate capture of medicines can be, a Lancet report showing that vaccine inequality had cost the lives of 600,000 people in low-income countries alone, confirmed it. This devastating and unnecessary loss of human life must be a wake-up call, and the beginning of the end for pharma monopolies.

While exposing big pharma’s crimes is an important step in achieving change, we also need to support new systems. That’s why in September we took a delegation of politicians and journalists to visit the South African lab which has reverse engineered Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine and started sharing that scientific knowledge with the world (see pages 14-15).

Polluters must pay for climate damage

Ahead of COP27, and during a global cost of living crisis where fossil fuel corporations are raking in record profits, Global Justice Now has been campaigning to make polluters pay compensation for the climate impacts, such as the devastating recent floods in Pakistan, they are causing.

We launched a new petition calling on the UK to help set up a new ‘loss and damage’ fund at COP27 and to finance it through increased taxation on fossil fuel corporations. We have also been collaborating with the Make Polluters Pay coalition and helped organise a Loss and Damage Action Day in September, with actions happening in London, Nottingham, Edinburgh and numerous other locations. Thank you to everyone who took part.

We have also been building public support for this approach in the media, including an appearance by our climate campaigner Daniel Willis on Jeremy Vine in August to argue that BP’s record profits should be used to provide climate compensation to the global south.

Read our new climate reparations briefing at:

globaljustice.org.uk/ climate-reparations

© Peter Moorey/Christian Aid © Rblfmr/Shutterstock

Pressure on Blackrock grows over Zambia debt crisis

As the global debt crisis intensifies, Global Justice Now is working closely with a revitalised international debt justice movement to push back against profiteering private lenders.

At the start of the summer, big banks finally agreed to stop collecting debt payments from Ukraine. This is a sign that debt relief can happen when the political will is there; now we need to make sure that other countries in debt crisis like Zambia are also offered a just resolution.

In September, as Zambia headed into negotiations with the banks, we stepped up our campaign against Blackrock, the US bank which holds a large share of Zambia’s private debt, by taking action outside their London offices and co-ordinating over 100 economists to publish an open letter calling for debt cancellation.

In October, we took part in global days of action against debt, building pressure on the G20 to act on the debt crisis before it’s too late. Ahead of COP27, we’ll continue working with this global debt movement, and green groups like Debt for Climate, to make debt cancellation a central element of international climate action.