Belgium (Brussels Morning Newspaper) Spain followed the Netherlands in quitting the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), a controversial international trade and investment agreement, providing legal protections for investments in fossil fuels.
In essence, the ECT, in place since 1998, allows fossil fuel companies to sue countries for almost any decision that impacts the investor’s expected profits, even if these are related to climate protection.
“We are in an extremely critical moment and we need valiant measures, the exit of the ECT is one of them and we celebrate it,” said Marta García Pallarés, spokersperson of the Madrid-based Ecologists in Action to the El Salto.
“Now it is crucial that more countries follow the path initiated by Spain. It is quite shameful that the EU countries go to COP27 in Egypt promising to reduce emissions, but it continues in a treaty that only in Europe protects fossil infrastructure for a value of more than €340 million,” added Pallarés.
Other European countries, like Italy, in 2016 and Poland, on 6 October, have quit the controversial treaty as their governments recognize its incompatibility with the 2015 Paris Agreement.
“The mandate for the European Commission was to bring the ECT in line with the Paris climate agreement. Despite many of the modernisations that are now in the negotiation outcome, we do not see how the ECT has been sufficiently aligned with the Paris Agreement,” Dutch Minister for Climate and Energy Policy Rob Jetten told the Dutch parliament on Tuesday.
Reforming the ECT
The EU executive conceded that the treaty was “outdated” and “no longer sustainable”. Last June, a round of negotiations between the Commission and national governments, aimed at reforming the ECT, didn’t seem to convince all EU capitals.
“The process to modernise the ECT was launched in 2017, but negotiations only started in 2020 and very little progress has been made in the most controversial areas,” stated the NGO CAN Europe, stressing how opaque and secretive discussions about the ECT have been.
The final verdict will take place on November 22, when all signatories are expected to ratify the text. EU countries and MEPs will also have to ratify it and doubts remain on whether a qualified majority will be reached, with Belgium having announced upfront it will not approve the reformed treaty.
“We call on other countries that have been critical about the reform, such as France, Germany, Slovenia, to reject the reform and step out of the ECT,” said Paul de Clerck, trade campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe.
The ECT was recently qualified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report on crisis mitigation as “a serious obstacle to climate change mitigation”.
