From the Journal of World Investment & Trade:
Since the time that the Calvo doctrine held sway, Latin America’s ambivalent relationship to investor-state dispute settlement has not ceased to elicit discussions and debates and generate a string of scholarly writings. Recently the region’s multiple responses to investment arbitrations, termination of a number of investment treaties and, in the case of three countries, denunciation of the Convention of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes have continued to fuel the debate. And the latter is on the point of taking yet a new turn. In November 2014, the Working Group on Responsible Dispute Investment Settlement of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) settled on a constitutive treaty that, if successful, will create Latin America’s own dispute resolution centre for investment disputes. The provisionallycalled UNASUR Centro de solución de controversias en materia de inversiones (UNASUR Investment Arbitration Centre) brings together the twelve UNASUR member states (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela) and the Working Group aspires to have it operational in the next couple of years. More recently, in March and April 2015, Brazil, the region’s biggest economy, concluded its two first cooperation and facilitation investment agreements (CFIA), investment treaties of a sui generis kind, that focus on investment facilitation and dispute prevention and bar access to investor-state dispute settlement.
These and other innovative features of the Latin American take on investment arbitration raise numerous questions and challenges for the region but also for the entire system of international investment protections. The Special Issue of the Journal of World Investment & Trade will aim to deal with some of the themes relating to the creation of the Centre and these other innovative aspects of the current and future Latin American approach to the reform of investment dispute settlement. ...
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The Journal of World Investment & Trade (JWIT) is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the legal aspects of foreign investment relations in a broad sense. This encompasses, among others, the law of bilateral, multilateral, regional and sectoral investment treaties, investor-state dispute settlement, and domestic law relating to foreign investment. The Journal is open to doctrinal analysis as well as theoretical, conceptual, and interdisciplinary approaches, including law and economics analysis, empirical analysis, historical analysis, political science analysis, or normative analysis.
The Special Issue ‘The Latin American Challenge to the Current System of Investor-State Dispute Settlement’ will use current developments and the proposed design of UNASUR’s investment dispute settlement centre, as an example of the Latin American ‘challenge’ to investment arbitration and place it within the wider context of reform of investor-state dispute settlement as evidenced elsewhere in the world. It will prioritise critical and theoretical (rather than descriptive) approaches that will guarantee a scientific interest in the volume long after its publication date.
The guest editors of this Journal of World Investment & Trade Special Issue are Katia Fach (University of Zaragoza, Spain) and Catharine Titi (University Panthéon Assas, France).
Scholars, IIA negotiators and experienced practitioners are invited to submit cuttingedge proposals that go beyond the state of the law to this call for papers for the Journal of World Investment & Trade.
Extended abstracts – minimum of 1000 words – or unpublished full papers should be submitted to both editors ([email protected] and [email protected]), along with the author’s name, affiliation, a CV that includes a list of relevant publications, and the author’s contact details.
All submissions and finalised papers must be written in English. Submission for the Special Issue is incompatible with parallel submission to a different publication.
Timeline:
The deadline for the submission of proposals is 30 June 2015.
Successful applicants will be informed by 31 July 2015.
The deadline for the submission of the finalised papers for accepted proposals is 30 November 2015. Intended publication is in the first half of 2016.
Finalised papers will be between 7,000-10,000 words (including footnotes) and must comply with the Journal of World Investment & Trade style guide which can be accessed here http://www.brill.com/files/brill.nl/specific/authors_instructions/JWIT.pdf.
More details here.
