The European Commission and UNCTAD Reform Agendas
The European Commission and UNCTAD Reform Agendas
Do They Ensure Independence, Openness, and Fairness in Investor–State Arbitration?
Recent approaches by the European Commission and UN Conference on Trade and Development to reform investor–State arbitration are reviewed in this chapter. The review focuses on often-neglected core issues of process and institutional structure in investment treaty arbitration: lack of institutional independence, lack of openness, and lack of procedural fairness. These concerns provide a framework for evaluating official reform agendas. They highlight whether the EC or UNCTAD acknowledges the concerns and, if so, whether their reform agendas respond. It is concluded that both reform agendas would make investment treaty arbitration more open albeit with important limitations (especially for UNCTAD). However, neither acknowledges and neither would address the lack of independence and fairness in the system. As a result, the reform agendas would expand and consolidate a system of international adjudication to review sovereign conduct and allocate public funds that is reasonably open but not judicially independent and procedurally fair.
Keywords: Independence, openness, fairness, investor–State arbitration, reform, CETA, European Commission, UNCTAD
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
