Simon Lester

10 years, man! 10 years! That's how long it has been since Joel did the first post (Tomer had the first comment).  It was on the EU GMO ban, and the EU's failure to comply with its WTO obligations.  What are the chances this issue will

You may have heard that there's this leading U.S. Presidential candidate making threats to violate U.S. international economic law obligations.  Yes, that one, but also this one: Hillary Clinton signaled a willingness to hold as "leverage" the patents of American companies keeping assets overseas

Recall that a while back, I talked about a new draft Indian model BIT.  As Investment Arbitration Reporter explains, India now has a final version of this model BIT.  IA Reporter has the complete rundown; I'm just going to mention briefly the general exceptions clause.  In the draft

Recall that the TPP tobacco carveout says this: Article 29.5: Tobacco Control Measures12 A Party may elect to deny the benefits of Section B of Chapter 9 (Investment) with respect to claims challenging a tobacco control measure13 of the Party. Such a claim shall not be submitted to arbitration

At the outset of the TTIP talks, people were talking up regulatory issues as the most important part.  But perhaps it was just too much to deal with, at least in such a short period of time.  Can everyone accept a "TTIP Light"?  This is from Inside US

This is from the FT: Washington has warned Brussels against granting China ‘market economy status’, saying the long-sought trade concession could hamper efforts to prevent Chinese companies flooding US and European markets with unfairly cheap goods. ... US officials have warned EU counterparts that granting Beijing MES would amount to

In various papers I've written, I'm sure I have made the point that prior to the GATT, world tariffs were around 40%, and the GATT/WTO brought them down from there to much lower levels.  I suspect others have done the same. But Chad Bown and

Investment Arbitration Reporter has the scoop: A tribunal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration has issued a decision dismissing a high-profile case between cigarette multinational Philip Morris and the Commonwealth of Australia. The PCA website indicates that a Decision on Jurisdiction and Admissibility was issued on December 17, 2015.

Last week, in a post about a systemic issue involving the calculation of the level of nullification or impairment in an Article 22.6 proceeding, Joost said:  "as systemic as this finding is, 22.6 arbitration reports cannot be appealed. Is this, however, not the kind of finding one

... but then I see this: More than 50 members of the World Trade Organisation on Wednesday concluded the biggest tariff-reduction deal in almost two decades, eliminating restrictions on the $1.3tn trade of 201 IT products. Wednesday’s expansion of the 1996 Information Technology Agreement will increase global gross