The European Union has traditionally sided with the USA in blocking progress on addressing conflicts of interest. However, calls for the EU to stop supporting Trump had been mounting through April, with open letters from 88 MEPs and 100 civil society organisations respectively, as well as thousands of US citizens signing a petition to call on EU negotiators not to back their fossil fuel-friendly President. Although it stepped back from Trump, the EU still did not actively support advancing a conflict of interest policy, despite people’s demands.
Tell finance minister Olaf Scholz from the social-democrata party of Germany that his country passes a tax transparency law so that big companies need to report on their earnings on a per-country basis. This is an absolute requirement in order to make big transnational companies pay their fair share in taxes.
The production of agricultural commodities such as beef, soy, palm oil and cocoa is responsible for 70% of all deforestation! Ask the European Commission to adapt a law ensuring that EU imports are free from deforestation and land grabs. Land rights activists are being criminalized and murdered. According to Global Witness 200 land defenders have been murdered in 2016. There are over 160 indigenous people in jail in Indonesia for protecting or using their ancestral forests. 3964 people were arrested between 1995 and 2014. Many people fall ill because Glyphosat is used on nearby soy plantations. Although the EU has committed to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation by 2020, it has never taken any steps to stop the terrible impacts that result from the consumption of these goods.
In just a few days world leaders will meet to turn the Paris agreement from a set of promised goals into concrete climate action. Call leaders of the EU for a policy that would keep Big Polluters from interfering in the climate talks; otherwise there can be no sufficient progress. This is very important as the Trump administration does everything to sabotage climate protection.
On the 20th of March the governments of the EU member states have given the European Commission the mandate for negotitations about a global investment court called MIC (multilateral investment court). Corporations increasingly use investment tribunals to attack rules that protect people and the environment: read about ISDS at elstel.org. This would entrench a massive parallel legal system that foreign investors can use to subvert democratic decision making.
