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Bilateral Investment Treaties and Regional Agreements

The agenda on investment and investment rules is being pushed at a furious rate in the context of bilateral investment treaties (of which there are almost 2,500 in existence), and investment rules in the proliferating web of regional and bilateral free trade agreements. Many of the concerns we identified in our early work on NAFTA's Chapter 11 have equal or greater weight in the case of these agreements. And the existence of such a tangled web of agreements intensifies the challenge of addressing those concerns.

Key agreements and Treaties

UNDP

• IISD-UNDP South and South East Asia Bilateral Investment Treaties Project
  In 2006, UNDP commissioned IISD to produce a report evaluating the impact of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) signed by the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) states on their sustainable development goals. This report will be available on this website shortly. Texts of the investment agreements and useful links on the subject are available.

NAFTA

• IISD began its work on NAFTA's Chapter 11 on investment in 1998. In 1999, we presented the first analysis of the impacts of Chapter 11 on the environment to the North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation annual meeting in June 1999. NAFTA's Chapter 11 and the Environment: Addressing the Impacts of the Investor-State Process on the Environment
  (PDF - 630 kb). In 2000, IISD began its ground-breaking work on Methanex v. USA and other work to address the concerns raised by the initial studies.

• Methanex v. the United States of America
  IISD sought and obtained precedent-setting friend of the court status in this watershed NAFTA 11 case. The case pitted a Canadian investor against the U.S. over California's ban of a suspected carcinogen.

• Private Rights, Public Problems: A Guide to NAFTA's Controversial Chapter on Investor Rights
  This book catalogues the problems both with the substance of the law in Chapter 11, and the process of investor-state dispute. Contains a compendium of annotated Chapter 11 cases current to March 2001.

• Note on NAFTA Commission's July 31, 2001, Initiative to Clarify Chapter 11 Investment Provisions (PDF - 167 kb)
  This paper, commissioned by the Joint Public Advisory Committee of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation's Chapter 11 session (Mexico City, March 24, 2003), surveys the problems identified to date with NAFTA's Chapter 11, both in terms of provisions and process. It also looks critically at the possible solutions.

• The Free Trade Commission Statements of October 7, 2003, on NAFTA's Chapter 11: Never-Never Land or Real Progress?
  (PDF - 237 kb)
  This brief analysis assesses a set of statements issued by NAFTA's Free Trade Commission October 7, 2003, related to NAFTA's Chapter 11. The statements addressed, among other things, transparency of the Chapter 11 process, and set out guidelines for tribunals' use in considering petitions for friends of the court status. To what extent do these statements represent real progress toward making the Chapter 11 process accountable, legitimate and transparent?

Germany

• Time for a Change – Germany's Bilateral Investment Treaty Programme and Development Policy
  Mahnaz Malik, Associate IISD, has analyzed the German BITs against the backdrop of the linkage between investment and sustainable development. Her research appears as Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) Occasional Paper 27, November 2006. She presented the paper at a meeting organized by FES in Berlin in December 2006.

U.K.

• UK Bilateral Investment Treaty Programme and Sustainable Development

Contents

• Methanex v. USA
  IISD sought and obtained precedent-setting friend of the court status in this watershed NAFTA 11 case. The case pitted a Canadian investor against the U.S. over California's ban of a suspected carcinogen.

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