Suggestions for the creation of permanent investment courts have been formulated for decades, but only recently they started taking actual institutional form. In particular, the European Commission has been pushing for a court-like mechanism for investment disputes in several recent trade negotiations. Such a framework was included in the EU treaties with Vietnam and Canada,...
A Tale of Two Unions. Debate on the Investment Court System and Competing Visions of European Integration
The paper discusses competing positions and arguments of main European actors in the debate on the Investment Court System (ICS). The European Commission pushes for the ICS to replace investor-state arbitration, in bilateral agreements (such as EVFTA and CETA), as well as a future multilateral solution. The ICS mechanism is meant to remedy legitimacy deficits...
Rules of Ethics and Qualifications of EU Investment Court Judges
This paper focuses on the new rules on qualifications of, and ethics applicable to, the members of investment tribunals to be established under the investment chapters of various free trade agreements (FTAs), such as the CETA the TTIP proposal, and EU – Vietnam FTA. This paper first seeks to identify whether the rules live up...
The Multilateral Investment Court project: Assessing the Contribution of the European Union – Vietnam FTA
In the EU-Vietnam FTA (EVFTA) the typical investor-State dispute settlement mechanism has been replaced with a different, new model. The paper will sketch out the main differences between the two mechanisms and suggest where the Vietnam government may expect certain difficulties with implementation of the new system. Moreover, the EVFTA mechanism is intended to be...