Brussels, 14/07/2014 (Agence Europe) - On behalf of the European Union on Thursday 10 July, the European Commission hailed the new agreement concluded at the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) the previous day aiming to strengthen transparency in the settlement of disputes between investors and states (ISDS).
The Convention on Transparency in Treaty-based Investor-State Arbitration will enable the UN rules on transparency to be applied more easily to investor-state dispute settlement carried out under existing investment treaties.
The new UN convention, adopted on 9 July, will enable countries and regional economic integration organisations - such as the EU - to declare their willingness to apply the transparency rules to cases brought under their existing investment treaties. The transparency of arbitration between investors and states can now thus be improved more easily and more swiftly than if it was necessary to renegotiate each of the existing investment treaties, the European Commission states in a press release.
The new transparency rules will be applied to investor-state dispute settlement in treaties concluded after 1 April 2014, and which contain a reference to UNCITRAL. Nevertheless, they will not apply automatically to existing investment treaties, such as the more than 1,300 bilateral investment treaties concluded by EU member states or to the Energy Charter Treaty to which the EU has been a party since 1998.
The convention will now be presented for final adoption within the UN system and will be open for signature from March 2015.
The EU has played a key role in developing these new transparency rules within the UNCITRAL working group on this issue. The EU is the main funder of the UN repository on ISDS - a database on ISDS which is accessible to the public (see EUROPE 11052). (EH)