ECT
The European Commission will not ask EU judges to decide on the legality of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism in free trade agreements.
Spain has suffered its first setback in an international arbitration process over its cuts to renewable energy subsidies.
Fifty years ago, an international legal system was created to protect the rights of foreign investors. Today, as companies win billions in damages, insiders say it has got dangerously out of control
In the rush to oppose TTIP we mustn’t lose sight of the context in which the deal is being negotiated — the hundreds of bilateral treaties that give corporations the right to sue in secret ’trade courts’.
Opponents of the trade deal being secretly negotiated between the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam have moved the discussion beyond its putative impact on jobs and growth and closer to the agreement’s broader ramifications, writes the IUF’s Peter Rossman.
According to UNCTAD, 40% of all new ISDS cases in 2014 were initiated against developed countries (the historical average is 28%). A quarter of them are intra-EU disputes.
In 2014, countries concluded one international investment agreement every other week. Investors continue to use investor-State dispute settlement, but the number of new cases does not reach the record high of previous years.
State measures that reduce or nullify existing creditor rights, such as the Argentine “Lock Law” or similar moratoria on repayment, may violate BIT rights and supply investors and creditors in other jurisdictions, particularly in the eurozone, with a basis for challenging similar measures.
The European Union today took an important step towards creating a comprehensive EU investment policy, with the publication of a Regulation setting out a new set of rules to manage disputes under the EU’s investment agreements with its trading partners.
On 28 July 2014, an international arbitration tribunal announced that Russia must pay $50.02 billion in damages to former shareholders of the now defunct oil giant, Yukos Oil Company. Analysis by Kavaljit Singh.
The National Farmers Union is among the labour, environmental, Indigenous, women’s, academic, health sector and fair trade organizations representing over 65 million people from both sides of the Atlantic that have signed a joint statement demanding that Canada and the EU stop negotiating an excessive and controversial investor rights chapter in the proposed Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).
Since the 1990s developing nations have been on a treaty spree, signing a vast number of bilateral and regional investment treaties to attract funds for development. But as the figure of investment treaties has shot up so have the claims for damages from investor companies, which are seeking billions of dollars in compensation on account of regulatory laws.
bilaterals.org team, Jan 2021