News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Sunday, February 28, 2021
The latest round of negotiations among the member states of the UNCITRAL Working Group III on ISDS reforms held last week (8-12 February 2021) revealed increasing diversity rather than more unity among the parties on the future of investor-state dispute settlement and EU-sponsored plans for a multilateral court system. The …
The European Union and Canada agreed on joint rules for their planned Investment Court System which is to become part of CETA. Any such court won’t see the light for a long time, but its rules reflect EU ambitions in other areas, namely hopes for a multilateral investment court and …
The EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment is of limited scope compared to other recent trade and investment agreements concluded by the European Union, writes Nikos Lavranos. The deal essentially focuses on investment facilitation and transparency rather than investment protection.
Nikos Lavranos analyses the EU UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement’s much-discussed level playing field, governance and dispute settlement provisions, with a related detour via climate change and energy.
The EU said it prevailed in its first bilateral FTA panel case against Ukraine in a dispute relating to Ukraine’s export ban on certain wood products, but the ruling also leaves Ukraine room to keep some restrictions. The ruling and the case prove that rules-based resolution of trade disputes remains …
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, alongside the CPTPP, is a powerful counterexample to ongoing global decline in rules-based trade. If these agreements deliver what they promise, its members, including China, will gain more economic and political influence across the world, writes Nikos Lavranos.
A special notification mechanism for breaches of labour and environmental provisions could end up being the ‘magic trick’ that sways the Dutch parliament to ratify the EU’s Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada, reports Nikos Lavranos.
Following one week of intense talks in Vienna and online, the reform process of international investor-to-state dispute settlement currently held under the umbrella of the United Nations Commission for International Trade Law’s Working Group III is moving nearer the endgame.
Ahead of a meeting of the Energy Charter Treaty members next week, the European Union has published its proposals in the form of legal to modernise what some called the WTO of energy. Discussions on modernising the ECT, an agreement that dates back to the early 1990s, have been …
Twenty-three governments have signed a previously leaked agreement terminating bilateral investment treaties known as BITs signed between themselves in a time when some of them were not yet members of the European Union. The move follows on the famous Achmea judgment of the Court of Justice of the EU in …
