With the results of the U.S. presidential election announced last week, international lawyers are now looking closely at how the incoming Biden Administration will handle the many challenges facing the global legal order.  President-elect Biden has promised to turn away from the unilateralism that marked the Trump presidency and instead focus on multilateral reengagement.1)See, e.g.,…

Many see the Pan-African Investment Code (PAIC), a model instrument adopted by the African Union (AU) in 2015, as the first step toward the ‘africanization’ of international investment law. While several national and regional instruments on foreign investments had been adopted by African States and Regional Economic Communities (RECs) prior to the PAIC, the latter’s…

In their reform discussions, States and arbitration institutions have been exploring the potential for investor-State mediation to work alongside arbitration, or even to replace it altogether for some disputes. While investor-State mediation has strengths relative to arbitration, any reform must carefully integrate mediation with existing processes and reform efforts.1)This post builds on: Esmé Shirlow, ‘The…

As North America embarks into a post-NAFTA era with the USMCA, it is crucial to analyze the new agreement’s disciplines. The USMCA Investment Chapter, for instance, has been the subject of many articles that have reviewed relevant differences with respect to NAFTA, particularly on investment arbitration. This post will explore the arbitration rules applicable to investment disputes…

Amid global economic uncertainty, the years-long project of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (“USMCA”) (also known as “the new-NAFTA” or “NAFTA 2.0”) has finally reached fruition. On March 13, 2020, Canada became the final North American party to ratify the agreement and now the treaty will enter into force on July 1, 2020. Kluwer Arbitration Blog has…

In less than a decade, the Republic of Côte-d’Ivoire enacted two investment laws (2012 and 2018). The latter one recently amended, reflects the best practices the country has learned from its previous investor-states disputes. On December 18, 2019 the Council of Ministers introduced some amendments to the 2018 Investment Code related inter alia to VAT…

On March 25, the European Commission issued a set of guidelines addressed to Member States, concerning foreign direct investment (FDI) from third countries and the protection of European critical assets. In face of the current crisis caused by the outbreak of Covid-19, the European Commission calls upon Member States to make full use of their…

In interpreting one of the most contested investment treaty protection standards – fair and equitable treatment – arbitral tribunals have increasingly referred to the necessity for an investor to conduct a due diligence investigation before investing in a host state. Foreign investors have been required to assess not only commercial, but also general socio-political risks….

On 25 January 2020, India and Brazil signed an investment agreement  (the “India-Brazil BIT”). As an agreement that has been signed at the dawn of the new decade, it is symbolic for a few reasons. First, it is a south-south agreement between two large and growing economies. Second, it abandons investor-state arbitration in favor of…

In response to the escalating COVID-19 crisis, States around the world have taken a variety of measures seeking to stem the spread of COVID-19 and to provide for medical supplies and protective equipment, including emergency declarations empowering governments to take control of private businesses, closure of borders, quarantines, stay-at-home orders, suspension of mortgage and utility…

On February 4, 2020, ICSID registered a request for arbitration submitted by the company Odebrecth Latinvest Sarl, a Luxembourg-based subsidiary of the Brazilian company Odebrecht SA, against the Republic of Peru (ICSID Case No. ARB/20/04). This post analyzes the background to this dispute, as well as the possible strategies that the parties could use during…

This is a follow-up post that updates on developments in the escalating tensions between Cyprus and Turkey over hydrocarbon explorations in the Mediterranean Sea. In the previous post it was argued that the Italian oil company ENI could launch an arbitration against Turkey under the Italy-Turkey Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) in the aftermath of the…

The growing public interest in investment treaties and investor-State dispute settlement has prompted an increasing number of States to open to public view aspects of investment treaty negotiations. During the negotiation of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (‘TTIP’), for example, both the European Union and the United States sought to ‘maximise’ transparency in the…

The Vienna Convention rules for treaty interpretation (VCLT) routinely referred to by all international courts and tribunals are known to be the result of a compromise between different schools of interpretation and therefore notoriously flexible, in my view too flexible for the purposes of modern-day international dispute resolution. Cases are therefore won and lost according…

Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) is facing significant opposition in its current form. Whilst some parties are engaged to find new common ground, others have unilaterally implemented measures aimed at ousting investor-state arbitration altogether. Over time, more and more attention has been paid to the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and its…

On March 27, 2019, Washington, D.C. hosted the 16th annual ITA-ASIL Conference discussing the impact of State parties in contract-based arbitrations.  Also known as private-public and “investomercial” arbitration, this genre of arbitration has recently grown due to, among other things, privatization processes, concession agreements, as well as conditions imposed by lenders and insurance companies. Providing…

The signing of the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (“IACEPA“) on 4 March 2019 marked an important milestone for both States (as covered in a post earlier this week). Given that both Indonesia and Australia have their reservations on investor-state dispute settlement (“ISDS“) processes, it is interesting to see that the IACEPA contains a chapter…

Last month, Australia and Indonesia signed the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (‘IA-CEPA’), containing in Chapter 14 provisions related to the protection of foreign investments. Negotiations of an IA-CEPA were initially announced in 2010, and formally began in September 2012. The negotiations were thereafter suspended, but relaunched in March 2016. Signature and ratification of the…

The conference “What to Do About Corruption Allegations? Debating the Options for Investment Law”, was presented by the ILA American Branch Investment Law Committee and the Georgetown International Arbitration Society, and hosted at Dechert LLP’s Washington D.C. office on 19 February 2019. The conference was dedicated to an in-depth exploration of the proof required for…

The OECD Secretariat launched, in 2018, a “FDI qualities project”. Its objective is to provide governments with a tool kit to attract investment that contributes as much as possible to sustainable development. For that purpose, the project has identified five clusters of “FDI qualities indicators”: productivity-innovation, skills, job quality, gender, and carbon footprint. These indicators…

The CERSA (CNRS- University Paris II Panthéon-Assas) organized its third event in a series of seminars on selected topics in international investment law and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) (for the report of the first seminar, see here). The seminar on Topical issues in ISDS: EU Investment Law was held in Paris on 7 February 2019…

In recent years, a number of arbitral tribunals adjudicating treaty-based investment disputes have been confronted with the question of what to do when the state party to such a dispute alleges that the investors acquired the investment through corrupt means. In some instances, tribunals have applied the defense as a jurisdictional bar, preventing the investors…

While the jury is still out on whether winter is coming or has already arrived regarding ISDS and investment treaties, I would rather turn to agriculture and use the metaphor of sowing the seeds and harvesting. Since July 2010, when the European Commission published its very first Communication on ISDS and investment treaties, it has…

Introduction The assessment of human rights within an investment arbitration framework, typical for the investor-state dispute resolution (ISDS) mechanism, is one of the topics which has gained significant momentum in the past years, and has led even to the establishment of a Working Group on International Arbitration of Business and Human Rights. Arbitral tribunals often…