Here's another "incorrect claim" about investor state that the European Commission responds to:
Claim: Investor state dispute settlement gives too many rights to companies
The Commission response is, "Wrong!" In fact, the Commission says, such rights are "limited," as they are restricted to "generally accepted principles of international law," such as "protection against discrimination, protection against unlawful expropriation and a requirement to treat investors fairly and equitably."
On this issue, I would note a couple things.
First, I think that the principle of non-discrimination could be fairly limited, but the way it is interpreted by some people in the field is potentially very broad, as it goes far beyond the idea of nationality-based discrimination, and ends up somewhere I can't quite figure out.
Second, while the idea of protecting against "expropriation" may be limited, protection against "regulatory expropriation" has a lot of uncertainty in it. National legal systems differ on the scope, and even within those systems the concept does not seem well-settled.
And finally, I don't think we even need to get into the jurisprudence on "fair and equitable" to have a sense of how vague, broad, and potentially "unlimited" these provisions are, simply based on the words themselves.
