• Multilateral regulation

Multilateral regulation

This paper responds to the need to identify and understand the linkages between international investment agreements (IIAs) and the debate on business and human rights. It provides a broad-based review of these linkages, focusing on the existing IIAs, and their relationship to business and human rights issues.

The author questions whether the international investment law regime plays a positive or negative role today in embedding global capital markets with the shared values and institutional practices that are supportive of sound human rights policy. The answer that comes forward from this paper is that it does not at present play a positive role, and has the significant potential to play a negative role. Yet, this need not be permanently the case.

The paper argues that there is a propensity today for drafters to include clauses that sound good but achieve little by way of legal security for a state’s right to regulate. It points out that overall, very little information appears to be available to the public to assess the commitment of states to raise human rights issues in their defense to investor-state claims.

Key recommendations include that:

• an expert meeting be convened with representatives of interested states, international organisations and civil society stakeholders to prepare model language that can be included in IIAs in order to promote the articulation and implementation of human rights values in international investment
• special attention should be paid to the issue of investor-state disputes by, inter alia, UN and other organisations having a special mandate to consider developing country interests in this field
• organisations responsible for international training courses on investment law and policy should include sessions on the relationships of IIAs to human rights, and the opportunities should include human rights law in arguments within the investor-state process.

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