Dispute Resolution in the AfCFTA Investment Protocol: a Preliminary Assessment and Proposal for Business and Human Rights Arbitration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper examines whether the Investment Protocol to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement aligns with international human rights law’s (IHRL) standards on the right to equality, non-discrimination, and access to an effective remedy. It argues that the Protocol’s dispute resolution model, which tilts towards ISDS, is incompatible with IHRL. This paper recommends incorporating the Hague Rules on Business and Human Rights Arbitration (Hague Rules) into the Protocol to create an IHRL-compatible dispute system, especially regarding enforcing human rights, environment, and climate obligations against investors and states. As African countries finalize the annex to the Protocol, they must replace ISDS with a BHR Arbitration framework as the dispute settlement regime within which investment players must enforce their rights.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.153 | 0.148 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.023 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".