Large Corporations and Investor-State Arbitration
Document Type
Blog Post
Publication Date
8-18-2023
Publisher
Wolters Kluwer
Language
en-US
Abstract
In May 2023, more than thirty members of the U.S. Congress sent a letter to the Biden administration, arguing that “[l]arge corporations have weaponized [investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS)] to benefit their own interests” and that “the broken ISDS system has time and time again worked in favor of big business interests.” This criticism against ISDS is not new. ISDS has often been perceived as a system primarily utilized by large corporations to serve their interests, despite evidence to the contrary. This perception is driven by some high-profile victories secured by large corporations (e.g., Occidental v. Ecuador), as well as significant cases brought by large corporations that challenged public health or environmental regulations of host countries (e.g., Philip Morris v. Australia; RWE v. Netherlands), which led to concerns of “regulatory chill.” Partly due to such concerns, several countries have terminated their bilateral investment treaties and international investment agreements that contain ISDS provisions. Despite such criticism and backlash, we still know relatively little about the users of the system, let alone which users are more likely to win cases or to use the system to chill regulations. This post summarizes the key findings of a recent article (the “Article”) that introduces a new dataset on the characteristics of claimants in ISDS cases up to 2020, focusing on the users and beneficiaries of ISDS, and the implications of these findings for ongoing ISDS reform.
Recommended Citation
Weijia Rao, Large Corporations and Investor-State Arbitration, KLUWER ARBITRATION BLOG (Aug. 18, 2023), https://arbitrationblog.kluwerarbitration.com/2023/08/18/large-corporations-and-investor-state-arbitration/
Publisher URL
https://arbitrationblog.kluwerarbitration.com/2023/08/18/large-corporations-and-investor-state-arbitration/
