ICAR and others call on USTR to remove ISDS provision under NAFTA in renegotiations

The Trump administration initiated the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to address the harms created by the Agreement and to ensure that a new version “benefit[s] the economies and populations of the United States and of our trading partners." 

In the opening statement during the first round of NAFTA renegotiations, Ambassador Robert Lighthizer of USTR correctly highlighted that to achieve this goal, one of the U.S. government’s negotiation priorities would be to ensure that the “dispute settlement provisions [be] designed to respect our national sovereignty and our democratic processes.”

In this letter, ICAR and others express support for this negotiating priority and urge the United States to reject and remove the investor-state dispute settlement system (ISDS) under Chapter 11 of NAFTA that empowers multinational corporations to undermine U.S. sovereignty and the United States government’s efforts to enact policies to protect the public interest, human rights and the environment.

The letter is available here.