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Posted: 02 May 2013 01:37 PM PDT.      Last week 12 Latin American governments gathered in Guayaquil, Ecuador to craft a common response to an increasingly common menace: costly "investor-state" suits in which foreign corporations are dragging sovereign governments to extrajudicial courts to demand taxpayer compensation for health, environmental, and other public interest policies.

Ecuador, the host of this "Ministerial Conference of Latin American States Affected by Transnational Interests," has taken a particularly hard battering from the investor-state system enshrined in NAFTA-style Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs). The country currently faces a ruling from one tribunal to hand $2.4 billion to Occidental Petroleum after Oxy broke Ecuador's hydrocarbons law, while confronting a ruling from another tribunal that the government should breach its own Constitution and block the...

UXBRIDGE, CANADA – The two weeks from April 5th to April 19th were a little nuts. Ontarians and Quebecers were given fourteen days by the National Energy Board (NEB) to apply for permission to have their concerns considered in the NEB's decision on Enbridge's Line 9 pipeline (Line9.ca). In the coming weeks we will find out who the NEB will allow to speak.

John Bennett of the Sierra Club Canada did a really good job describing his misadventures with the NEB's "Application to Participate" in his blog.  I agree with John too. We should write the NEB to express our disappointment and frustration. It was not a fair process. At the end of John's blog entry you...