BOLIVIA: Citizens, Media Excluded from Bechtel Trial by World Bank Tribunal

The Bechtel Corporation was handed a powerful victory last week, when a secretive trade court announced that it would not allow the public or media to participate in or even witness proceedings in which Bechtel is suing the people of Bolivia for $25 million. Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of the California-based engineering giant, is suing South America's poorest nation over the company's failed effort to take over the public water system of Bolivia's third largest city, Cochabamba. After taking over the water system in 2000, the company imposed massive water rate hikes, which resulted in widespread protests countered by military force that killed one person and wounded 175 others.

Oscar Olivera, a leader of the coalition of Bolivian peasants, workers
and others that formed in opposition to Bechtel, said, "Now the World
Bank is not only imposing its ideas and programs on us, it is also preventing
the people affected from participating in a case that directly affects our
lives. This is profoundly undemocratic."

Bechtel's legal action is being heard by the International Center for
the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a tribunal administered by
the World Bank that holds all of its meetings in secret. Bechtel is suing
Bolivia for the profits it claims it would have made from the water
privatization scheme had the rate hike protests not led to its
unplanned departure from the city of Cochabamba in April 2000. (See background
story at PBS.org


http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bolivia/)

The President of the tribunal arbitrating the case responded last week to
a petition filed by Oscar Olivera and a coalition of other Bolivian
citizens and public interest organizations seeking to participate in the case.
(View the petition


http://www.earthjustice.org/news/documents/boliviapetition.pdf).

The President's letter asserted that the tribunal had no power to
permit affected citizens to participate, a stance inconsistent with other
arbitral tribunals and U.S. courts, where interested parties are regularly
allowed to submit "friend of the court" briefs. The letter also
indicated the tribunal's rejection of the groups' requests that documents and hearings in the case be open to the public. (View the letter denying access


http://www.earthjustice.org/news/documents/2-03/ICSIDResponse.pdf)

The tribunal is comprised of one member appointed by AdT, one appointed
by the Bolivian government, and a third - the tribunal's president -
appointed by the President of the World Bank. "The panel explicitly rejected
all of our requests for public participation in this closed-door process,"
said Martin Wagner, an attorney for the US-based law firm, Earthjustice.
"It is inexcusable that a panel considering an issue as fundamental as the
right to water should be able to exclude the very people whose rights will be
affected by the case."

According to Sarah Anderson, Director of the Global Economy Project at
the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, "There has been an
outpouring of international support for the Bolivian petitioners in
this case. So many people have become familiar with such investor-state
lawsuits from the NAFTA experience and they see them as one of the most extreme
examples of excessive power granted to corporations."

REQUESTS FOR PUBLIC PARTICIPATION DENIED

In August 2002, a coalition of citizens' organizations from around the
world requested in a letter to the tribunal (View letter and signatories

http://www.earthjustice.org/news/documents/citizensletter.pdf)
that the panel make all of the documents and meetings in the case
public, that it travel to Bolivia to receive public testimony, and that it
allow Bolivian civic leaders to be an equal party to the case. The tribunal's
response to the petition serves as a rejection of this request as well.
"The ICSID Tribunal's decision reveals structural deficiencies in
the ICSID arbitration system," said Marcos Orellana an attorney for the Center
for International Environmental Law (CIEL). "By failing to recognize its
power to allow affected citizens to participate in the case, the Tribunal's
decision would allow corporations such as Bechtel to manipulate and
compromise the integrity of international arbitration, as well as
countries' ability to protect the public welfare."

The legal team representing the Bolivian petitioners includes
California-based Earthjustice and the Washington, DC-based Center for
International Environmental Law (CIEL), both of which have been involved
in attempts to intervene in similar investor-state lawsuits filed under
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). "The World Bank's
secret trade court has now made it absolutely clear that it wants to continue doing its work behind closed doors, without pubic scrutiny or participation by
the people expected to pay Bechtel off," said Jim Shultz of the Bolivia-based Democracy Center. "Neither the public nor the media will be allowed to know when the tribunal meets, where it meets, who it hears from, or what they say. This secrecy is just a preview of what communities in the U.S. can expect under the proposed FTAA [Free Trade Area of the Americas, an extension of NAFTA].

Local governments from Alaska to Chile will be dragged before secret
panels as multinational corporations, like Bechtel, seek to undo local
environmental, health, worker and consumer protections, branded as
barriers to free trade."

AFTERMATH OF A REVOLT AGAINST WATER PRICE HIKES

In the late 1990s the World Bank forced Bolivia to privatize the public
water system of its third-largest city, Cochabamba, by threatening to
withhold debt relief and other development assistance. In 1999, in a
process with just one bidder, Bechtel, the California-based engineering
giant, was granted a 40-year lease to take over Cochabamba's water,
through a subsidiary the corporation formed for just that purpose ("Aguas
del Tunari").

Within weeks of taking over the water system, Aguas del Tunari imposed
huge rate hikes on local water users. Families living on the local minimum
wage of $60 per month were billed up to 25 percent of their monthly income.
The rate hikes sparked massive citywide protests that the Bolivian
government sought to end by declaring a state of martial law and deploying
thousands of soldiers and police. More than a hundred people were injured and one 17-year-old boy was killed. In April 2000, as anti-Bechtel protests
continued to grow, the company's managers abandoned the project.

Aguas del Tunari filed the legal action against Bolivia last November,
demanding compensation of $25 million, a figure that represents far
more than the company's investment in the few months it operated in Bolivia.
The action also aims to recoup a portion of the company's expected profits
from the project. The company filed the case with ICSID under a bilateral
investment treaty between the Netherlands and Bolivia. Although Bechtel
is a U.S. corporation, its subsidiary recently established a presence in
the Netherlands in order to make use of the treaty.
The rules in the Dutch-Bolivian treaty are similar to those in NAFTA
and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.

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