Shadow Courts: The Hidden Danger in Trade Agreements

Thursday, October 6, 2016
6:00pm — 7:00pm ET
World Room
Pulitzer Hall
Columbia University
116th & Broadway
New York, NY
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Why did Ecuador have to pay Occidental $1.7 billion, or Venezuela $1.6 billion to Mobil? Secret tribunals don't just exist in Hollywood thrillers. They are real, and corporations have been using global super courts to sue small, poor nations for profit. Jeffrey D. Sachs, Haley Sweetland Edwards, and Luis A. Parada will discuss ISDS (investor-state dispute settlement), one of the main reasons why politicians and activists rage against international trade deals.

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Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned professor of economics at Columbia, leader in sustainable development, senior UN advisor, and syndicated columnist. He is also the bestselling author of The End of Poverty; Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet; The Price of Civilization; To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace;and The Age of Sustainable Development.

Jeffrey Sachs on TransCanada and TPP, watch here.

Haley Sweetland Edwards, author of Shadow Courts: The Tribunals that Rule Global Trade, is a correspondent at Time. Previously, she was an editor at the Washington Monthly, where she wrote about policy and regulation. From 2009 to 2012, she lived and worked in the Middle East and the former Soviet Union, where she wrote for The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Foreign Policy. She studied philosophy at Yale University and journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Luis A. Parada is a partner at Foley Hoag's International Litigation and Arbitration Practice, where he has represented many governments in ISDS cases. Luis' international arbitration experience includes representing Latin American States in seven international arbitration proceedings before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).  Full bio here.