Category: Asia-Pacific regional architecture

[Updated: 25 July 2017]
The future of investment treaties, especially as part of “mega-regional” free trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), has become very uncertain given the isolationist volte-face of the Trump Administration. This project explores the historical and likely future trajectory of investment treaties, including the sometimes politically controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) procedure, especially in the rapidly growing and diverse Asia-Pacific region. The book focuses on the extent to which Asia-Pacific economies (individually and/or through sub-regional groupings like ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) have been or are more likely to become “rule makers” rather than “rule takers” in international investment law, and in what sense.
The following book proposal, accepted in July 2017 by Brill for publication in its Nijhoff International Investment Law Series, is based mainly on papers presented at conferences comparing contract- and treaty-based arbitration of investment disputes in ASEAN member states (held in Bangkok in July 2016) and across the wider Asian region (held at USydney in February 2017, with a summary by Ana Ubilava available via Kluwer Arbitration Blog) and reproduced (without hyperlinks) on this Blog.

Continue reading ““International Investment Treaties and Arbitration Across Asia” – Julien Chaisse & Luke Nottage (eds)”

By: Ana Ubilava (PhD in Law student, University of Sydney)
[This is a non-hyperlinked version of the posting at http://kluwerarbitrationblog.com/2017/03/01/international-investment-arbitration-across-asia-symposium/]
On 16 February 2017, the Centre for Asian and Pacific Law at the University of Sydney (CAPLUS) and the Sydney Centre for International Law (SCIL) co-hosted a symposium on the theme: “International Investment Arbitration Across Asia”. The symposium, sponsored also by the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre and Herbert Smith Freehills, brought together leading experts of international investment law from Southeast Asia, North Asia, India and Oceania. The symposium re-examined the historical development of international investment treaties in the Asian region, focusing on whether and how the countries may be shifting from rule takers to rule makers. A focus was on the ASEAN(+) treaties, including the (ASEAN+6) Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) at an advanced stage of negotiations, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement, which was discussed more broadly as an urgent topic in the wake of the change of direction by the US under President Donald Trump’s administration. Participants at the symposium also elaborated on the experiences of Asian countries with ISDS mechanisms, and the attitude towards ISDS before and after first major investor-state arbitration (ISA) cases in the region. The many speakers and discussants for the event further explored possible future trajectories of international investment treaty policymaking of Asia-Pacific countries, especially China, Japan, Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand.

Continue reading “International Investment Arbitration Across Asia: A Symposium”

[A version of this posting appears on Kluwer Arbitration Blog on 14 November 2016.]
Critics of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement, and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) protections more generally, have often argued that a particular concern is that the US is not only a large source of FDI, but that it is ‘the nation whose corporations use ISDS the most’ (referring to ANU’s Professor Thomas Faunce). A recent paper by ANU’s Dr Kyla Tienhaara for the ‘GetUp’ campaign in Australia, in the context of ongoing parliamentary inquiries into ratifying the TPP, contends that Australia is at risk because US investors have brought multiple claims against Canada. (By contrast, Charles-Emmanuel Cote points out that ‘damages effectively awarded or agreed to in settlement so far [amount to] US$147.5 million, or a mere 0.05 percent of all US investment’ into Canada.) More generally, Tienhaara argues :

The biggest users of ISDS are US multinational corporations. This means that entering into a trade deal with the US that includes ISDS provisions – such as the TPP – places a country at high risk of ISDS suits.

The inference is that Americans are particularly ‘litigious’ in the field of investment treaty claims – perhaps like they are purported to be in civil litigation in their home courts. In fact, empirical research into comparative civil dispute resolution patterns had long pointed out that a representative state within the US (in terms of urban/rural population mix, such as Arizona) has fewer filings per capita than countries such as Israel and Germany [Nottage & Wollschlaeger ‘What Do Courts Do?’ [1996] NZLJ 369].
Table A and Figure A-1 in the attached version of this posting confirm that investors from the US had indeed lodged the most ISDS claims by end-2015 (138). Yet, on a per capita basis (per 100,000 people in the home state), US investors are historically less litigious compared to investors from eleven other countries whose investors have filed considerable numbers of ISDS claims. Those states are all in the EU (including Belgium and Luxembourg, which generally conclude investment treaties collectively and whose investors have filed the most claims per capita), except for Switzerland (whose investors become the fourth most litigious) and Canada (the fifth most litigious home state). As further indicated in Table A and Figure A-2, if we group together most of these EU states their investors’ per capita ISDS claim rate is also higher than that for US investors.

Continue reading “Are US Investors Exceptionally Litigious with ISDS Claims?”

Treaty-based investor-state arbitration (or ISDS more generally) is an increasingly topical issue, as FDI flows continue to grow, especially across Southeast Asia and the rest of the Asian region, and host states have begun to experience some claims brought by disgruntled foreign investors.
This conference organised for Thursday 16 February 2017 by the Centre for Asian and Pacific Law at the University of Sydney (CAPLUS) and the Sydney Centre for International Law (SCIL), with sponsorship from Herbert Smith Freehills, builds on the lively and timely conference funded by Chulalongkorn University’s ASEAN Studies Centre in Bangkok on 18 July 2016, which compared the experiences and policy debates in each of the ten ASEAN member states. Those country reports are now being revised for review and eventual publication in a leading journal, with versions then being combined with papers on pan-Asian investment treaties and arbitration to be presented on 16 February 2017, for a co-edited book published by the same legal publisher.
This upcoming conference will bring together leading experts from Southeast Asia, North Asia, India and Oceania, including several from institutional partners of USydney. It will help round off a major cross-institutional and interdisciplinary research project into international investment dispute management more generally, funded by the Australian Research Council since 2014. The annual SCIL “International Law – Year in Review” symposium will also take place the next day, on Friday 17 February 2017.

Continue reading ““International Investment Arbitration Across Asia”: USydney, 16 February 2017″