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Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a proposed mega trade deal that was negotiated between the European Union and the United States.
The original mandate to the European Commission stated: “the Agreement will include an appropriate dispute settlement mechanism”.
The investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism in TTIP has drawn fierce criticism from civil society groups from both sides of the Atlantic. They claimed in December 2013, in a letter to the European Commission and the Office of the United States Trade Representative that ISDS was “a one-way street by which corporations can challenge government policies, but neither governments nor individuals are granted any comparable rights to hold corporations accountable”.
In 2014, the European Commission launched a public consultation about the inclusion of ISDS in TTIP. The result was very clear: 97% of the 150,000 participants said no to ISDS.
The European Commission put forward in 2015 a proposal for an alternative mechanism, named
