Many of us heaved a sigh of relief when Philip Morris lost its challenge to Uruguay's tobacco plain packaging regulations. In the euphoria of the moment, it was easy to ignore the unpleasant fact of a dissent.  Yet much of the value to Philip Morris in attacking, both

According to some sources, China has charted out a $300 billion plan to become nearly self-sufficient by 2025 in a range of important industries, from planes to computer chips to electric cars as it looks to kick-start its next stage of economic development. This so-called “Made in

An investor operates a facility in what has become one of the most dangerous places in the Middle East; despite the efforts of the host state's army, terrorist attacks on the facility continue.  According to a recent ICSID decision, the failure of Egypt to stop terrorist attacks on

It has been reported that Korea is considering bringing a WTO case against China over the trade retaliations China has taken in the wake of Korea's decision to install the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. However, I think this is unlikely to happen as the Korean

If you are looking for indications as to how the Trump administration trade policy team might approach changes to WTO dispute settlement, this new report by Terry Stewart and Elizabeth Drake, entitled "How the WTO Undermines U.S. Trade Remedy Enforcement," might be a good place to start.

In my previous post I took issue with what appears to be the basic premise of super-arbitrator Kaufmann-Kohler's approach to creating a multilateral investment court: because of the overriding importance of maximum enforcement instruments for investors, a multilateral tribunal can't deviate too much from

Currently the European Commission and Canada are at the forefront of an initiative to replace traditional investor-state arbitration with a multilateral investment court.  The latter would likely include a true appellate mechanism, serious rules on arbitrator ethics and against conflict of interest, judges who are qualified in public international

The FT has a copy here. It is being portrayed as more evidence of the U.S. planning to move away from the WTO, and perhaps it is, but to be honest the language is not as radical as I expected.  Yes, there are mentions of "sovereignty" and

This is from the FT: The Trump administration is exploring alternatives to taking trade disputes to the World Trade Organisation in what would amount to the first step away from a system that Washington helped to establish more than two decades ago. Incoming officials have asked the US Trade Representative’

Over on twitter, my friend Colin Brown and I were discussing exceptions clauses in international investment agreements.  When I suggested that it was important to have such exceptions apply to the fair and equitable treatment obligation, he asked, "but why would one need an exception from failure to provide