Why Tribunals Imposing Corporate Sovereignty Are Even More Dangerous Than We Thought

from the above-the-law dept

Back in October, we introduced the term "corporate sovereignty" as an alternative to the standard but misleading phrase "investor-state dispute settlement" (ISDS) that is generally used. We noted that perhaps the worst manifestation of corporate sovereignty so far can be seen in Ecuador, where one of the secret tribunals used in these cases had ordered the Ecuadorean government to place Chevron above the country's constitution.

A detailed and important post from Public Citizen's Eyes on Trade blog not only sketches the background to that extraordinary demand, but also explains how things have since become even worse:

Now Chevron is asking the same extrajudicial tribunal to order Ecuador's taxpayers to hand over to the corporation any of the billions in damages it might be required to pay to clean up the still-devastated Amazon, plus all the legal fees incurred by the corporation in its efforts to evade justice.

Yes, you read that correctly: the oil giant's latest outrageous plan is to force the Ecuadorean government -- and hence the people of Ecuador -- to pay for the massive clean-up of the damage Chevron's predecessor company, Texaco, caused to the country, its environment and local communities. As the Eyes on Trade post points out, this means:

[the ISDS tribunal] is acting as if the sovereign court ruling and two decades of trial never happened. In its recent decision, the tribunal barely made mention of the domestic ruling in Ecuador, or of the preceding 18 years of litigation spanning two nations. Many of the arguments that Chevron is bringing before the tribunal are the very same ones the corporation used before Ecuadorian courts -- arguments that were rejected. Rather than even examine the domestic courts' logic, the tribunal has invited Chevron to make the same arguments again as if for the first time.

The case of Ecuador shows how a company can use the corporate sovereignty chapter in international agreements to ignore years of adverse decisions by a country's highest courts, and to appeal to three arbitration lawyers who take no account of local legislation, practice or traditions, and are literally a law unto themselves.

But maybe Ecuador is just an exception: perhaps ISDS tribunals in other cases have been more respectful of national laws and existing decisions. New research from Gus Van Harten, associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto, suggests otherwise. Studying 162 corporate sovereignty cases, Van Harten reports that 37% of them involved reviewing a government action, while 44% were about disputed legislation or judicial decisions. In other words, in these cases, ISDS tribunals were clearly placing themselves above a country's politicians and judges. Worryingly, Van Harten found:

there was little evidence that arbitrators demonstrated restraint in ways commonly adopted by domestic and international courts.

Moreover:

the field has apparently offered arbitrators a fertile environment for creative lawyering alongside expansive approaches to their authority.

Unlike traditional judges, whose scope for action is tightly circumscribed by national laws, tribunals that ruled on cases brought under corporate sovereignty clauses had far more leeway for interpretation or -- even worse -- "creative lawyering." Van Harten concludes:

In policy terms, the observations indicate a need for closer scrutiny by a range of actors -- such as national associations of legislators or judges -- of how arbitrators exercise their power and about whether their performance accords with considerations of public accountability, judicial restraint and basic even-handedness.

He also has some advice:

states facing a reasonable prospect of investor claims, or seeking protection for non-Western investors, should systematically assess their anticipated exposure or protection and consider their options to avoid downside risks.

Of course, one obvious way to avoid those risks is for nations to refuse to agree to corporate sovereignty chapters in the first place.

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Filed Under: corporate sovereignty, ecuador, investor state dispute settlement, isds, tribunals
Companies: chevron

Censorious, Abusive Spanish Anti-Piracy Firm Targets Chevron (Yes, Chevron) With Bogus Copyright Takedowns

from the who-do-you-root-for? dept

Here are two separate stories we've covered in the past that we never expected to link up. First up, there's the massive set of legal disputes that Chevron has been involved in down in Ecuador. The legal battles have been going on for 20 years and still continue. I won't get into all of the details there, but you can click that link to read the basics. We've actually written about this fight in a few more specific contexts over the years: (1) a few years ago, Chevron sought to force a documentary filmmaker to turn over some of the cut footage from his documentary, which Chevron won. The company claimed that the footage would help it get the lawsuits dismissed, whereas the filmmaker argued it was like forcing a reporter to give up his sources. (2) Just a few months ago, we wrote about how a judge in NY gave an incredible ruling, giving Chevron access to nine years' worth of Americans' email metadata, as they went in search of details about those who have fought the company concerning the case. (3) Even more recently, we wrote about how the whole "corporate sovereignty" concept -- better known as the boring-sounding (but extremely important) "investor state dispute settlement" -- was being used to try to kill off the $18 billion judgment against Chevron by the Ecuadorian courts.

Second, there's the strange case of Spanish "anti-piracy" firm Ares Rights, which didn't actually seem that interested in "anti-piracy" but in out-and-out censorship via copyright fraud on behalf of various Latin American countries. Ares Rights (correctly) realized that copyright notice-and-takedown provisions were a de facto censorship tool, and has used that to the maximum advantage possible, regularly issuing highly questionable copyright takedown claims to take down all sorts of content that might embarrass the governments of Ecuador or Argentina, even if they have no legitimate copyright interest in the material.

Now, however, Adam Steinbaugh alerts us to the news that Chevron itself has posted a blog post on a blog the company has dedicated entirely to the Ecuador lawsuit (yes, they have an entire blog on the topic) in which the company explains how Ares Rights has begun issuing a similar series of completely bogus takedowns on Chevron's own videos.

You may have noticed that our videos on The Amazon Post are currently down. In late November, Ares Rights, a firm based in Spain that claims to be “devoted entirely to the defense of rights on the Internet,” filed copyright infringement claims against videos legitimately posted to YouTube by Chevron.

Chevron also chides Ecuador for its recent attempts to "rebrand" itself as the "home of internet freedom" at a time when it's doing plenty of things that suggest it is not a fan of internet freedom at all.

Chevron claims that it's working to get those videos back up, and details past abuses of copyright law for the sake of censorship by Ares Rights. No matter what you might think of Chevron, it's difficult not to think that, if the company decided to pursue Ares Rights with a DMCA 512(f) claim of misrepresenting the copyrights and seeking sanctions, the case could suddenly get very interesting. It would certainly be the most money ever behind establishing a 512(f) violation, and it would be nice to get a good ruling on that front in a case where the actions are especially blatant, obvious and censorious.

Filed Under: 512f, abuse, censorship, copyright, dmca, ecuador
Companies: ares rights, chevron

Ecuador Looks To Ban Wikileaks-like Offerings, Despite 'Housing' Assange

from the be-careful-who-your-friends-are dept

We had always pointed out that Ecuador was a somewhat odd choice for Julian Assange to seek asylum with, given that the country doesn't have a great track record on press freedoms. And some recent actions have suggested that, even as Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the relationship between Assange and Ecuador is strained. Given that, perhaps it's no surprise that Ecuador is now contemplating a new bill that would criminalize publishing classified documents, which would certainly turn a significant part of Wikileaks into a criminal operation:

Pablo Romero, the director of Ecuador’s intelligence agency SENAIN, asked the Justice Committee of Ecuador’s National Assembly on August 8 to draft legislation that would “criminalize the disclosure of confidential information of the State” and require would-be publishers to seek government approval before publication. Romero gave as an example the hypothetical publication of special agents’ salaries.

The bill would outlaw the publication of classified documents even if they had previously been published abroad.

That, of course, is a pretty big attack on press freedoms, which does seem slightly ironic. I know that people will likely use this to attack Assange, just as they attack Ed Snowden for ending up in Russia -- but in both cases that seems like misplaced anger. The anger should be towards countries putting in place such awful policies. The fact that Assange has ended up with Ecuador and Snowden with Russia has a lot more to do with the political realities of people trying to stay away from an over-aggressive American government that seems hell bent on putting both men in prison for as long as possible. Given that reality -- combined with things like the US pulling Snowden's passport -- they really had little choice. Yes, it would be great if believers in press freedom could go somewhere that actually respected press freedom, but there are, tragically, very few places that qualify these days -- and when the country that sets itself up as the biggest protector of press freedoms, the United States, is trampling those freedoms to try to get at these two guys, their options are exceptionally limited.

Filed Under: ecuador, free press, julian assange, wikileaks

Court Gives Chevron Access To Nine Years Of Americans' Email Metadata

from the seems-a-bit-extreme dept

For a few years now, we've been following a rather troubling legal fight between people in Ecuador and Chevron -- the oil giant that has been in a long-term legal battle with people in Ecuador over some of its actions in that country. A few years ago, we wrote about how Chevron was ordering a documentary filmmaker to turn over cut footage, claiming that it might exonerate the company (the filmmaker tried to hold it back, claiming it was protected under journalist shield rules). However, last fall, we noted something perhaps even more troubling. Chevron had issued subpoenas seeking various email info from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft going back years. As we noted at the time, they weren't seeking the content of the email, but the were seeking what many more people are now familiar with as "metadata." But, metadata can be quite revealing.

When we wrote about this case a year ago, it was under the context of one person, Kevin Heller, whose data was sought, and him successfully fighting back (with some help from the ACLU) getting Chevron to drop the request for his info. But, as for everyone else's info? Mother Jones alerts us to the news that a judge in NY recently said it was okay for Chevron to get all that metadata, in some cases going back nine years.

...a federal court granted Chevron access to nine years of email metadata—which includes names, time stamps, and detailed location data and login info, but not content—belonging to activists, lawyers, and journalists who criticized the company for drilling in Ecuador and leaving behind a trail of toxic sludge and leaky pipelines. Since 1993, when the litigation began, Chevron has lost multiple appeals and has been ordered to pay plaintiffs from native communities about $19 billion to cover the cost of environmental damage. Chevron alleges that it is the victim of a mass extortion conspiracy, which is why the company is asking Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, to cough up the email data. When Lewis Kaplan, a federal judge in New York, granted the Microsoft subpoena last month, he ruled it didn't violate the First Amendment because Americans weren't among the people targeted.

Leaving aside the fact that the court thinks it's okay to do this even if it's just "non-Americans" who have their privacy violated here, Mother Jones points out that this claim that it only targeted non-Americans isn't, in fact, true. Pesky details.

Now Mother Jones has learned that the targeted accounts do include Americans—a revelation that calls the validity of the subpoena into question. The First Amendment protects the right to speak anonymously, and in cases involving Americans, courts have often quashed subpoenas seeking to discover the identities and locations of anonymous internet users. Earlier this year, a different federal judge quashed Chevron's attempts to seize documents from Amazon Watch, one of the company's most vocal critics. That judge said the subpoena was a violation of the group's First Amendment rights. In this case, though, that same protection has not been extended to activists, journalists, and lawyers' email metadata.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) represents 40 of the targeted users—some of whom are members of the legal teams who represented the plaintiffs—and Nate Cardozo, an attorney for EFF, says that of the three targeted Hotmail users, at least one is American. Cardozo says that of the Yahoo and Gmail users, "many" are American.

This seems like a pretty big problem, given the rationale of the judge initially. Beyond that, just the basic chilling effects from finding out that a giant company could get access like this to so much metadata on a large list of its critics is fairly incredible. As the article notes, while subpoenas on people who aren't actually parties to a lawsuit are "routine," they're not supposed to be mass fishing expeditions, which they appear to be in this case.

And, of course, even the whole "well they're not Americans so the First Amendment doesn't apply" thing is highly questionable -- since many of the accounts are anonymous internet users, and the First Amendment does protect online anonymity and there's no way for Chevron or the judge to know if the anonymous users are Americans or not.

Filed Under: ecuador, email, first amendment, metadata, privacy
Companies: chevron, google, microsoft, yahoo

Bolivian President's Jet Rerouted On Suspicions Snowden Could Be On Board; Multi-Country Outrage Ensues

from the we-are-all-Bolivians dept

The Snowden saga continues to deliver surprising twists and turns that may well have important geopolitical knock-on effects. The latest involves the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, whose country is rumored to be willing to offer political asylum to Snowden. Here's what happened, as reported by The Guardian:

Bolivia reacted with fury after a plane carrying the country's president home from Russia was diverted to Vienna amid suspicions that it was carrying the surveillance whistleblower, Edward Snowden.

France and Portugal were accused of withdrawing permission for the plane, carrying the president, Evo Morales, from energy talks in Moscow, to pass through their airspace.

Both Bolivia and Austria deny that Snowden is on board, but no one has been allowed to check. Since being forced to land in Vienna, Morales has now been given permission by France and Portugal to overfly their territory, but not by Spain, which had also refused. The simultaneous revocation of permission to pass over these countries looks rather suspicious. The Bolivian defense minister, Ruben Saavedra, who was on the flight, has no doubts about who is behind it:

"This is a hostile act by the United States State Department which has used various European governments."

The Bolivian Vice-President said they had been "kidnapped by imperialism" in Europe. That framing has now been taken up by other South American governments, who have expressed their outrage at the insult to Bolivia and hence their region. As The Guardian reports in an update on the Bolivian story:

Argentinian president Cristina Kirchner has tweeted that she has been advised that Peruvian president Ollanta Humala will call a meeting of the Union of South American Nations [UNASUR] to discuss ongoing events.

And -- ironically -- Ecuador has re-entered the story after trying to distance itself from Snowden:

Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, has also railed against what he called an "affront to our America," and called on his fellow South American presidents to "take action".

Posting on Twitter, Correa wrote: "Decisive hours for UNASUR! Either we graduated from the colonies, or we claim our independence, sovereignty and dignity. We are all Bolivia!"

There is clearly a lot of political grandstanding and opportunism here. But there seems no doubt that this latest development will sour relationships between the US and South American nations, at least for a while. Spain and Portugal also come out of this badly, and are likely to lose influence among their former South American colonies. This latest incident shows once again the impact of Snowden's actions, which continue to cause major ripples throughout the entire diplomatic world.

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Filed Under: airspace, argentina, austria, bolivia, ecuador, ed snowden, evo morales, france, portugal, russia, spain, us, us imperialism

Latin American Countries Band Together To Fight Growing Problem Of Investor-State Disputes

from the US/EU-take-note dept

As Techdirt has observed, investor-state dispute resolution (ISDR) is turning into a major weapon that corporations can deploy against nations in order to claim damages for some alleged loss of future profits as a result of government action -- for example, stricter health or environmental regulations. Last year alone, 62 new investment arbitration cases were initiated against nations, and a record award of $1.77 billion was made against Ecuador.

Given that fact, it is perhaps not so surprising to see that country leading a new alliance of nations affected by ISDR and aiming to fight back:

Leaders of several Latin American countries have set up a new coalition to coordinate actions to face the growing number of international legal suits being taken against governments by transnational companies.

A ministerial meeting of 12 countries held in Guayaquil, Ecuador, decided on several joint actions to counter the threat posed by these law suits, which have claimed millions or even billions of dollars from governments.

"No more should small countries face law suits from big companies by themselves," said Ecuador's Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino, at a media conference after the meeting which he chaired. "We have now decided to deal with the challenges posed by these transnational companies in a coordinated way."

As well as holding a conference on the subject, and creating an observatory to monitor cases, the countries agreed to set up a new regional arbitration center for settling investment disputes. This is designed to address one of the biggest problems with the current ISDR mechanism:

The proposed centre is to provide an alternative to existing international tribunals which are seen as biased in favour of investors' interests.

The tribunals, such as ICSID (based at the World Bank in Washington), have also been accused of being mired in conflict of interest situations. Only a few arbitrators hear a majority of cases, with many of them also appearing as lawyers for companies in other cases, and some being board members of transnational companies.

The above article goes on to explain that there have been around 500 ISDR cases so far, with a high number involving Latin American countries: Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela and Mexico have each had 20 to 30 ISDR actions brought against them.

A background note explaining the reason for the meeting said that arbitration proceedings and claims by European and US multinational companies against a growing number of states of the South have dramatically increased.

These costly litigations, the majority of which were decided in favour of the investors, not only affect the States’ fiscal situation but pose a serious challenge to their national jurisdiction and sovereignty, and compromise on-going development plans in Latin America and other regions.

This problem originated in the 1990s when bilateral investment treaties were signed by developing countries in the expectation of attracting foreign investments, but the negative consequences of such commitments have now become evident, said the note.

In other words, what seemed like a fairly minor issue when signing up to the investment treaties many years ago has since grown into a serious threat to many countries' finances and even sovereignty. That's something that both the US and EU would do well to remember when negotiating the TAFTA/TTIP agreement, which seems certain to discuss the possible inclusion of ISDR measures suffering from exactly the same problem.

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Filed Under: ecuador, investor state dispute resolution, investor state disputes, isdr, latin america, tpp

Spanish Anti-piracy Firm Ares Rights History Of Censorship By Copyright For Ecuador & Argentina

from the el-efecto-streisand dept

We already wrote about Ecuador apparently using highly questionable copyright takedowns to help censor documents that revealed Ecuador's government's attempts to purchase surveillance tools. In response, Ecuador first claimed that the documents were faked, but Adam Steinbaugh has done a truly fantastic investigation into the company that issued the takedown, Ares Rights, which is a Spanish company that has sent takedown messages for both the Ecuadorian government and the Argentinian government. In multiple cases that Steinbaugh found, the takedown efforts clearly seemed targeted at stifling speech, rather than any legitimate copyright interest.

First, as Rosie Gray notes, Ares Rights asserted copyright claims targeting a documentary that was less than friendly toward Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa.

When the documentary was posted to YouTube and Vimeo, Ares Rights quickly issued DMCA takedown notices on behalf of Ecuador’s state-operated TV channel, ECTV, on the basis that the documentary contained “unauthorized images” from ECTV.

[....] Nor is this Palma’s only connection to works in Ecuador.  This week, he claimed copyright ownership over, among other things, this “wanted” poster depicting an alleged child molester in Ecuador, Jorge Glas Viejo: Why would someone go to great effort to preserve the copyright in this image?  I can only speculate: the ‘wanted’ poster omits the last name of the suspected child molester, leaving him with the same name as Jorge Glas, an Ecuadorian politician and friend of President Correa.

There’s also this DMCA takedown, in which Ares Rights operated at the behest of Ecuador’s communications secretary, Fernando Alvarado, to remove photos purportedly showing a woman he was seeing.

Steinbaugh has a lot more in his article, which is absolutely worth reading, including an email conversation with the guy who is apparently in charge of Ares Rights, claiming he can't answer Steinbaugh's questions about who the client is because it might violate privacy laws. He also shows evidence that Ares Rights has done similar things for Argentina as well.

This morning we had noted that Scribd had taken down the documents. Then it was reported that Dropbox had taken down the documents as well. Steinbaugh is now hosting the documents himself. In solidarity, Ken "Popehat" White is now hosting the documents as well. And we're including the documents below as well.

Let's be clear about this: this is blatant abuse of copyright for the sake of censorship. First, if it's true that the documents are "fake," then the government certainly has no copyright claim on them, because they're not legit. We saw this same ridiculous attempt by Diebold a decade ago, insisting that documents were fake, and then filing copyright claims on them, by which they admitted they were real. Second, if the documents are real, the copyright claim itself is suspect, because there's almost no creativity in these documents that should qualify for copyright. These are basically requests to buy some equipment, which almost certainly don't reach the level of creativity to deserve copyright. Third, and most importantly, even if you could argue that there's some sort of legitimate copyright in these documents, posting them is undoubtedly fair use under the laws of the US where the documents are hosted. These documents are clearly newsworthy, being used for news reporting, and have no impact on Ecuador's "market" for the documents (because there is no such market).

This is, without a doubt, an abuse of the DMCA to try to censor documents that a particular government does not like. At the very least, it should open up Ares Rights to a potential 512(f) claim for abusing the DMCA.

Either way, we've been saying for years and years that copyright is a tool of censorship, and here's yet another example.

Filed Under: argentina, censorship, copyright, dmca, ecuador, surveillance, takedown
Companies: ares rights

Ecuador Pulls Ed Snowden's Travel Papers Because Julian Assange Thinks He's In Charge

from the yay,-politics dept

Things keep getting more and more ridiculous concerning the Ed Snowden asylum drama. It's never been fully explained how or why Snowden decided to link up with Wikileaks to get "help" in finding a place to get asylum, but ever since then, Wikileaks has been presenting itself as Snowden's spokesperson, and apparently that's not going over well with some people, including Ecuador, the one country to most prominently express interest in granting Snowden asylum, and the country which granted him travel documents. Except, in large part because of the Wikileaks connection, Ecuador has pulled those papers, in a move that seems to be a combination of petty politics and spite:

President Rafael Correa halted an effort to help Snowden leave Russia amid concern Assange was usurping the role of the Ecuadoran government, according to leaked diplomatic correspondence published on Friday.

Amid signs Quito was cooling with Snowden and irritated with Assange, Correa declared invalid a temporary travel document which could have helped extract Snowden from his reported location in Moscow.

Correa declared that the safe conduct pass issued by Ecuador's London consul – in collaboration with Assange – was unauthorised, after other Ecuadorean diplomats privately said the WikiLeaks founder could be perceived as "running the show".

Apparently, some Ecuadorian officials have been urging Ecuador's president to distance himself from Assange, and that the public perception was that Assange was running the show, rather than Ecuador. Of course, I wonder how much of this has to do with other leaks concerning Ecuador's own surveillance efforts as well. Or, perhaps more likely, how much it has to do with threats from the US should Ecuador accommodate Snowden.

It does seem likely that even without Ecuadorian travel papers, some country will happily take Snowden. But, in the meantime, it presents yet another complication.

Filed Under: ecuador, ed snowden, nsa, russia

Ecuador Using Copyright To Try To Take Down Leaked Documents About Its Surveillance Practices

from the copyright-as-censorship dept

While Ecuador has received plenty of attention for granting asylum to Julian Assange and being one possible landing place for Ed Snowden, it's no secret that the country is not exactly known as a bastion of civil liberties protection. In fact, last year, just as it was granting Julian Assange asylum, there were reports coming out about highly questionable activities by the Ecuador government in extraditing someone who had exposed corruption. In that post, it was noted that Ecuardor scrapped its own rules requiring a warrant to investigate someone's IP address and has been known to seize the computers of critical journalists.

So, it should come as little surprise that while so much attention is on Ecuador, it was leaked to Buzzfeed that the country is in the middle of purchasing equipment for widespread surveillance, including a system called "GSM Interceptor" (subtle!) and some unmanned surveillance drones. Basically, the country does not have a great record on protecting civil liberties or freedom of the press.

But, here's where the story gets even more bizarre. Buzzfeed's reporters, Rosie Gray and Adrian Carrasquillo, had posted the various documents they got revealing these purchases on Scribd and embedded them beneath the story. Here's a screenshot: Could there be a copyright claim? Well, unlike the US, many countries do allow government documents to be covered by a form of copyright, but even so it seems ridiculous that Ecuador is clearly using copyright to try to stifle a free press in discussing its surveillance efforts. It's yet another example of copyright being used for censorship, made doubly ironic in that it came about while trying to stifle documents about its surveillance program that only came to light because the of possibility that it might offer political asylum to Ed Snowden for revealing US surveillance. Are there any places left on earth that actually do respect basic civil liberties?

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, ecuador, ed snowden, julian assange, leaks, surveillance

Ecuador Tells US To Take Its Trade Agreement And Shove It, After Threats Relayed Over Snowden

from the wow dept

One of the points that many people have made concerning most countries in the world is that they're loathe to challenge the US on many things, even when they're in the right, because they're so reliant on the US for trade. The US regularly lords this fact over countries in seeking to get its way. In fact, US officials had been very strongly suggesting to Ecuador that if it decides to take in Ed Snowden and grant him asylum, that there could be consequences for trade under the Andean Trade Preference Act that both countries are signed to, but which needs to be renewed next month. Specifically, US politicians suggested that they might not allow the renewal if Ecuador granted asylum.

In response, Ecuador has taken a stand: saying that it's breaking the trade agreement upfront as it doesn't appreciate the attempt by the US to blackmail it in this matter.

President Rafael Correa's government said on Thursday it was renouncing the Andean Trade Preference Act to thwart US "blackmail" of Ecuador in the former NSA contractor's asylum request.

Officials, speaking at an early morning press conference, also offered a $23m donation for human rights training in the US, a brash riposte to recent US criticism of Ecuador's own human rights record.

Furthermore, they made it quite clear that this is entirely about the US' actions in trying to pressure them about Snowden:

"Ecuador does not accept pressure or threats from anyone, nor does it trade with principles or submit them to mercantile interests, however important those may be," said Fernando Alvarado, the communications secretary.

"Ecuador gives up, unilaterally and irrevocably, the said customs benefits."

As the article notes, some of this is surely political. It is a bit of a populist move by the government, and many suspected that the trade agreement was unlikely to be renewed anyway by the US, so in some ways this is an attempt to get out in front of that story and pull something of a "you can't fire me, I quit!" move. Still, it highlights, once again, the way the US bullies smaller countries, and how that can backfire.

Filed Under: andean trade preference act, asylum, atpa, blackmail, ecuador, ed snowden, edward snowden, rafael correa, threats, trade agreements