The Global Regime of Investor Rights: Return to the Standards of Civilised Justice?

Abstract

The capital-exporting states of the North Atlantic long insisted that the standards of civilised justice mandated that capital-importing states respect the property rights of their nationals engaged in commercial enterprise abroad. Only a single North Atlantic conception of civilisation worked to provide content for this purported international standard, even as that content was contested by capital-importing states from Latin America and elsewhere. It is said that the construction of a new global legal regime for the promotion and protection of foreign investment, made up of some of some 2,800 bilateral and regional investment treaties, has rendered that debate redundant. The meaning to be attributed to the standards of protection contained in these treaties, however, remains hotly contested by states from the global South. In an attempt to resolve these disputes, scholars are resorting to the law of economically powerful states of the global North, employing methodologies reminiscent of those prevalent in the era of civilised justice.