Trade deals can allow international companies to trample the rights of governments in the Global South. This is the message of the Colombian government, which describes the impact of such deals as “Bloodbath“For their national sovereignty. And now Colombia president Gustavo Petro said he wants to renegotiate the deals his country made with the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom.

He has a strong case because the United States and European countries have also been renegotiating similar trade and investment deals, while trying to prevent being sued in the secret “corporate courts” these deals create.

And just this year, the British government pulled out of a toxic investment deal, called the Energy Charter Treaty, after a series of cases in which European governments were sued by fossil fuel companies for taking climate actions that supposedly hurt the profits of said companies.

So the question now is whether European countries will accept the fact that the countries of the South need the same political space to deal with climate change and the many other problems they face. Or whether they will demand that these countries continue to abide by these terrible one-sided deals.

At the heart of the problem is what is known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS. In essence, the investor-state dispute settlement system creates a “corporate court,” which allows multinational companies from a trading partner country to sue governments in an international court.

These “corporate courts” have been included in trade and investment deals since the 1950s, and were initially intended as a means of protecting Western interests in developing countries. They have created a legal system that will make it more difficult for governments that may want, for example, to nationalize oil fields owned by Western multinationals. So, from the beginning, these deals were implicitly neo-colonial.

But with the passage of time, the scope of these company courts has been expanded by corporate lawyers. Today, companies are able to file lawsuits over any law or regulation they don’t want. Worse still, these cases are often heard in secret, overseen by corporate lawyers who don’t have to worry about the impact of their decisions on society, human rights or the environment – ​​just investment law. These “courts” usually do not have the right of appeal, and can only be used by foreign investors.

As such, ISDS has been used by tobacco companies to challenge governments that wish to ensure that cigarettes are only sold in plain packaging. They have been used to challenge unexpected minimum wage increases and taxes. But increasingly, they are being used to challenge all kinds of environmental rules needed to stop climate change. In fact, these changes are becoming a major impediment to the climate actions governments must take to keep our planet habitable.

As such, Western countries find themselves obligated to collect hundreds of millions of dollars from companies, simply for exercising their democratic duties. It is not surprising that they canceled the treaties that put them in this situation. But they are less keen to allow other governments to take the same measures. There is one rule for us, and a whole other rule for the Global South.

The Colombian government has decided to get rid of this hypocrisy and take matters into its own hands. President Petro said allowing companies to settle disputes outside national courts should never have happened, saying instead that Colombia was forced to “put ourselves in the wolf’s mouth.”

He’s right. In the past decade, 23 known cases have been brought against Colombia under the Investor-State Dispute Settlement System, many of them issued by foreign mining companies in direct response to measures taken by Colombia to protect the natural environment and indigenous rights.

For example, mining giant Glencore sued Colombia following the decision by the country’s Constitutional Court to suspend the proposed expansion of what is already the largest open pit coal mine in Latin America.

The Cerrejon mine has always faced fierce local opposition and has led to air and soil pollution, toxic water supplies and the displacement of 35 indigenous communities from their ancestral lands. The Constitutional Court decided that expanding the mine would severely impact the local community’s ecosystem.

Glencore said the court’s decision was discriminatory, unreasonable and arbitrary, and used the dispute resolution system to bring four separate cases against Colombia. She won the first case and received $19 million, while the other three cases are still under consideration for undisclosed sums of money.

In a separate case, Canadian mining company Eco Oro is seeking $696 million in damages when the Constitutional Court ruled to protect the Paramos – rare high-altitude wetland ecosystems that serve as vital sources of fresh water. Although the investor-state dispute settlement system in question is explicitly supposed to guarantee governments political space to protect the environment, the arbitration panel ruled that this environmental exception does not preclude the obligation to pay compensation.

Colombia is not alone. In recent years, countries including Kenya, South Africa and Ecuador have begun to emerge from this largely undemocratic system. One of the first treaties that Colombia wants to renegotiate is the UK-Colombia deal. Colombia’s ambassador to the UK was clear in condemning the deal, saying these treaties “have become a drain on Colombia and many other countries,” specifically pointing to the power they give the fossil fuel industry to roll back climate action and sue countries. “Because they did not gain what they wanted to gain by polluting.”

But they will face serious opposition. This means they will need support from citizens and movements here in Britain. Fortunately, the trade union that includes civil servants who work for the UK government to negotiate trade deals has already declared its support for the Colombian position, saying: “We need real action on climate.”

We must join them. ISDS is an obscure system, but in recent years activists have brought it out of the shadows and begun to dismantle it in several business deals. Seventy years after this neocolonial system first emerged, we can finally defeat it. If we want to stop climate change and build democracy, we must do it quickly. Colombia is now on the front line, and it needs our support.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.