An uneasy decade: examination of the first ten years of explicit interaction between human rights law and the ICSID Investor-State Arbitration Tribunals

Abstract

The investor – state tribunals have gone from attempting to give effective protection to investors’ rights for scarce, individual complaints to addressing fundamental questions about state measures taken for public purpose. Investor-state arbitration has come under great criticism in the recent years for allegedly overly constricting the states’ ability to regulate in public interest. Drawing on a wide array of case law, this thesis evaluates how the limits of investor protection have been understood by the investor-state tribunals under the auspices of the ICSID over the past ten years, to assess what that means in the light of human rights obligations of the states and to review how successful the implemented reforms of the system were and are likely to be in increasing the human rights considerations in the ICSID system.