 So ISDS stands for Investor to State Dispute Settlement. This is a very old-fashioned regime that has been introduced through international treaties that are signed government to government between countries, and they originated in the post-colonial era. So when, for example, British investors in what became the newly independent Tanzania were concerned that some of the assets which they owned in Tanzania might now be taken away by the new Tanzanian government. So the British are no longer ruling Tanzania, the Tanzanians are ruling Tanzania, and British investors were concerned about what that might mean for their property in the country. So the way that they're negotiated, they're signed between one state and another, but they actually confer rights on individuals and companies, which is completely unusual in international law. And those rights which the companies receive, they can enforce through ISDS, Investor to State Dispute Settlement. So what it means in general terms is a very small three-person team of commercial lawyers who are appointed one by their investor, one by the state, and one who's agreed between the two, and they sit in secret, and they decide on the merits, they act like judges. So they decide the outcome in cases where investors have a complaint against a state. In our view, it's a completely flawed system. It's a system that goes beyond what is needed for commercial purposes by companies, and it grants massive, massive powers, untrammeled powers, you could say, to a small group of commercial lawyers who have no specialism in questions of public interest law. Because the criticism of ISDS is that while it originally, it originated out of the need for protection of expropriation, states stealing a company's assets, it has grown massively over the years, and what it now can do is reduce the right of the state to regulate in the public interest. So to make laws or regulations, for example on issues about the environment, on issues about public health, because if a company feels that that law in any way damages their prospect of future earnings, the company can take the government to court, and the process for trying the claim is very biased, because it's a tiny court with no oversight, no scrutiny. They're not publicly appointed judges, they're commercial lawyers, who act on a case by case basis, and so they have a self-interest, a professional interest in winning new work, so in coming to conclusions which are generally, or often, investor-friendly, rather than state-friendly. So the dangers are to states' right to regulate in the public interest, and the system has been used to challenge public health regulation, environmental regulation, so I can give social regulation progressive economic policies. In South Africa there was a case, a very famous case where a group of Italian and Luxembourg investors challenged South Africa's black economic empowerment legislation. They said that it was discriminatory against them, because the legislation said that companies needed to have a certain proportion of their shareholding black-owned in South Africa, and that is a result of the long history of apartheid and racial discrimination in that country. In that case, the investors had a good claim, and the South African government in the end chose rather than fight all the way to the end to settle out of court, so effectively the investors had a successful claim there against black economic empowerment legislation. The European Commission have put forward a whole series of reform proposals. The positive thing about those is that they acknowledge their problems with the current system. The problem with the reform proposals is that they don't go far enough. They're not sufficient in themselves to remove the problems, for example, with the South Africa case. In other challenges, investors are challenging tobacco legislation, tobacco marketing legislation, the decision in Germany to phase out nuclear power. These are all public policy decisions that are being challenged through ISDS, and the Commission's reforms don't go far enough to stop that.