Human Rights and Investor-State Dispute Settlement: Changing (Almost) Everything, so that Everything Stays the Same
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article critically reviews some of the most recent developments in relation to reforms of ISDS, focusing on both the European and the international reform efforts. As to the former, we discuss two major developments: the establishment of the Investment Court System (ICS) in the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the proposed mechanism of a Multilateral Investment Court (MIC), intended to replace ICS, once in force. At the international level, we offer an overview of the UN negotiations to reform ISDS conducted under the auspices of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Working Group III. In reviewing these reform efforts we ask whether and how the (proposed) reforms address the major flaws of ISDS and, more particularly, the negative impact on the human rights of investment-affected communities and individuals. Regrettably, we find that the panoply of reform proposals discussed at the EU level and in the UN environment run the risk of reflecting the aspiration of the old adage: ‘for everything to stay the same, everything must change’. We then present two main paths more likely to achieve transformative change: the first is to maintain ISDS, but to reform it in new and radical ways; the second implies the definitive disposal of ISDS. As to the former, we discuss proposals for granting states, investment-affected communities and individuals a right to initiate a claim against investors. We conclude that a reformed international investment law, which incorporates human rights and endows investment-affected communities and individuals with enforceable rights, may be a better alternative than abandoning ISDS tout-court.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".