Our co-blogger Bryan Mercurio published an excellent policy brief at the World Health Organization (WHO) Bulletin. (“International investment agreements and public health: neutralizing a threat through treaty drafting”) This is his conclusion: “International investment agreements need not pose a threat to legitimate health measures. The addition of limitation clauses such

Last week, Andrew posted about the possibility of an exception to investment obligations, as part of the TTIP.  I'm interested to see where exceptions of this sort can take us in terms of preserving policy space, but I think we should also consider the obligations themselves as part

GATT Article X:2 provides that: 2. No measure of general application taken by any contracting party effecting an advance in a rate of duty or other charge on imports under an established and uniform practice, or imposing a new or more burdensome requirement, restriction or prohibition on imports, or

Early next week, plurilateral negotiations on liberalization of trade in green goods will be launched at the WTO.  The negotiations are based on an agreement between a sub-set of WTO Members that was announced at Davos, and represent a new beginning for the treatment of environmental goods and services at

Simon has noted on the blog before the increasing interest in including an Article XX-type exception in investment agreements, as a way of helping to resolve some of the regulatory issues raised by, eg, the FET and expropriation obligations. Indeed, many of you will have seen that Article XX is

Many of you have probably noticed a new WorldTradeLaw.net web site.  Some aspects of the site are free for everyone, so I thought I'd mention one particular issue here on this blog:  How to link to PDF versions of WTO DS documents on the site. On the

This is from Inside U.S. Trade ($): Representatives of two U.S. regulatory agencies yesterday (June 24) expressed varying degrees of skepticism toward the idea of expanded regulatory cooperation with the European Union under a U.S.-EU trade deal, and raised fears that an agreement could slow down their

This morning in Florence I presented a very rough version of a paper I'm working on about food security post-Bali.  As followers of this site will recall, thanks to India holding firm, the interim solution on food security contains a peace clause that precludes dispute settlement complaints concerning

There are two new pieces on ISDS that are very good, one from UNCTAD and one from ECIPE.  Both have lots of good data on ISDS cases.  I'll let the data speak for itself, but I wanted to comment on the ECIPE piece, which is authored by Roderick