Remarkably, the Australian government has given Chinese companies a general right to buy resources and other assets in Australia – so-called market access – without getting the same right for Australian companies in China.
A consensus is clearly forming around changes and adjustments needed to reform ISDS, but the main stakeholders – businesses and governments – have yet to make a clear stand, argue Adrian-Catalin Bulboaca and Marius Iliescu
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
What do we call it when Ottawa signs a deal with an unelected regime that would prevent any future elected government in a small African nation from changing its laws regulating Canadian-owned mines for almost two decades?
India is caught in a pincer at this moment in time as it is faced with the twin need of FDIs to propel and sustain growth and also the need to fi rewall its sovereign rights to formulate policies without extraneous pressures from its trade partners and the corporate world.
This report for US Congress answers frequently asked questions about US international investment agreements including provisions for investor-state dispute settlement.
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’.
Apart from its network of BITs, Indonesia is also a party to a number of multilateral and regional investment agreements such as the ASEAN Comprehensive Investment Agreement which also contain an ISDS clause, including recourse to ICSID arbitration.
Labor has called on the federal government to follow the example of the Howard years and oppose the inclusion of a controversial dispute-settlement provision in trade talks with the US.