No Trial, No Judge, No Jury
A secluded private courthouse in Washington DC is currently the scene of a gargantuan legal battle that could have serious ramifications for all of us. Yet virtually nobody knows about it. On one side of the battle is the tiny, poverty-crippled Central American nation of El Salvador; on the other is Pacific Rim, a Canadian mining company that was acquired by the Australian corporation Oceana Gold in 2013. At stake is the basic issue of who owns what in tomorrow’s world.
Putting Gold Before Water
In 2009, Pacific Rim filed a private lawsuit – what is referred to in the impenetrable jargon of modern globalism as an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) – against the government of El Salvador for $301 million, equivalent to just over 2% of the country’s $24 billion GDP. As BBC World reports (in Spanish), the amount is equivalent to three years’ combined public spending on health, education and security.
The company argues that El Salvador unfairly denied its mining permit after it began an exploration process for gold mining, costing it hundreds of millions of dollars of ‘potential future profits.’
This post was published at Wolf Street by Don Quijones ‘ October 3, 2015.
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