NAFTA/TRADE DEALS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Lawmakers from both parties urged President Donald Trump’s top negotiator in talks over the North American Free Trade Agreement to maintain dispute-resolution mechanisms that have been a central part of the 24-year-old pact.
The dispute-arbitration systems embedded in Nafta have been a flashpoint in the talks, where Mr. Trump’s administration has questioned the mechanisms, saying they undermine U.S. sovereignty by allowing the parties to avoid the domestic courts. The lawmakers’ lobbying adds to pressure on the administration to retain that component of the agreement.
Many Republicans want to retain, in particular, an arbitration mechanism known as investor-state dispute settlement, which lets companies challenge discriminatory treatment at the hands of a foreign government—and win compensation.
In the talks, which began last August, the U.S. has proposed scaling back the systems, or allowing the U.S. to opt out of the system. Canada and Mexico have rejected that idea, saying they would prefer to remove the investor-state provision from the three-way Nafta agreement and form their own bilateral investor pact rather than remain a part of a system under Nafta in which different countries have different rights, according to people familiar with the talks…
The dispute-resolution issue is one of several that have concerned lawmakers who have companies or farms in their districts that have benefited from the export markets Nafta has created and want to preserve the beneficial parts of the trade pact.”
-William Mauldin, “Lawmakers Press Trump Administration on Nafta Dispute Resolution,” The Wall Street Journal online, Feb. 7, 2018 03:14pm