On Tuesday 3 November, as the third round of negotiations on modernising the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) was opening, 102 MEPs and 142 members of national parliaments urged the European Commission to ensure that the provisions in the ECT that protect foreign investment in fossil fuels are removed from the treaty.
“Phasing out fossil fuels from the ECT investment protection mechanism is for us a prerequisite for the negotiations on the modernisation of the ECT”, says the joint declaration by the 244 parliamentarians.
They state that the treaty “is a serious threat to Europe’s climate neutrality target and more broadly to the implementation of the Paris Agreement”.
They have in their sights the highly controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement Mechanism (ISDS), which allows investors to sue a treaty state in private arbitration tribunals if they believe they have been harmed by a decision made by that country’s government.
“ISDS provisions need to be scrapped or fundamentally reformed and limited”, say the politicians.
They also ask EU Member States to explore pathways to jointly withdraw from the ECT by the end of 2020 if the third round of discussions does not lead to the removal of provisions that protect investment in fossil fuels.
On 22 October, during a debate in the European Parliament, Kadri Simson, the Commissioner for Energy, stated that the European Commission’s aim is to ensure that the treaty “only protects those investments that support transition to a climate neutral energy system”.
She expressed reservations about withdrawing from the treaty, but was nevertheless prepared to consider it as an option in the absence of an ambitious agreement with the other signatory countries (see EUROPE 12587/3).
The statement can be found at: https://bit.ly/35SSEGo (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)