Multilateral Treaties Research Articles

Move Away from BITs Framework: A Need for Multilateral Investment Treaty?

The objective of this paper is to critically evaluate the desirability of multilateral treaty that will take into account the needs of developed and developing countries alike as developed nations seek to protect their investment abroad while developing nations want to attract investment, be able to regulate and most importantly they want to limit access to international arbitration. In achieving this objective, the paper will give a snapshot of recent developments indicating a shift away from BITs framework, international investment arbitration and what was considered customary international law of investment. Following from these highlights, the paper will then consider the need of multilateral investment treaty against the current developments. Further, the paper will then discuss how such a multilateral treaty should look like in order to get a buy-in from both the developed and developing nations.

The Protection of Energy Investments under the ECT: An Extra-EU Country’s Perspective

This article examines the issues arising from the tension between EU law and the ECT that have significant implication on extra-EU disputes. First, it examines the relationship between secondary EU legislation and the ECT obligations, to demonstrate that they should be understood to form a hierarchical relationship in which the latter has primacy over the former. It then addresses the question of attribution and responsibility for breaching acts between the EU and its Member States, and proposes that a joint liability should be the norm for the ECT. It proceeds to examine the principle of ‘harmonious interpretation’ between EU law and the ECT provisions, the principle applied by the tribunal in Electrabel v. Hungary. It argues that, by effectively prioritising EU law (including secondary EU legislation) over the ECT obligations, the Electrabel tribunal’s approach fails to reflect the balance between the protections of foreign investors under the ECT and the economic integration of EU Member States. This article concludes by arguing that, given that the ECT is a multilateral treaty with a wide geographical distribution, a clear recognition of the nature of the ECT as an international agreement by relevant adjudicatory bodies and the European Commission would be necessary for a sustainable and effective protection of energy investments under the ECT.

The Formation of the Principle Prohibiting Wars of Aggression before the Establishment of the United Nations Organization

The first international legal instruments of universal scope aiming at limiting the right of States to the war, began to develop only at the end of the XIX - early XX centuries. The author conducts a legal review of all such instruments, paying particular attention to the Charter of the League of Nations adopted in 1919, the year which included very substantial restrictions of the traditionally recognized right of States to war. Nevertheless, the logical interpretation of the Charter of the League of Nations leads to the conclusion that there is some kind of procedural subterfuge that opened broad opportunities for States to resort to war Considering the Paris Treaty for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy 1928 (the Kellogg-Briand Pact) as the first universal treaty that establishes the prohibition of wars of aggression, the author pays special attention to its significant shortcomings, one of which was that the said prohibition was concerned exclusively with war in the proper sense of the word, while other forms of use of armed force in international relations have been left outside its scope. The abovementioned circumstance necessitated the elaboration of a definition of aggression and consolidation of such a definition in an international instrument. The efforts made in this direction are also covered in this article. The author conducts a detailed study of other multilateral and bilateral treaties (in addition to the two above-mentioned), paving the way for the formation of the principle of non-use of force in international relations as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations. In addition to the relevant international standards, the author also studies some doctrinal drafts, in particular those relating to the period of the emerging science of international law and showing a gradual rooting of ideas on the need to limit the right of States to war in the legal conscience

MTE29.02 Advances in Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma

MTE29.02 Advances in Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma

Ending International Investment Agreements: Russia's Withdrawal from Participation in the Energy Charter Treaty

When states withdraw from bilateral investment treaties or denounce multilateral treaties related to foreign investment, a range of intersecting questions arise in domestic and international law. Recent developments have demonstrated potential incongruities between domestic and international approaches to investment protection, including as regards the effectiveness of withdrawal and the implications for existing investments. This essay reflects on international and domestic disputes involving the withdrawal of the Russian Federation from participation in the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) to highlight these interactions. These issues have become particularly pertinent today because more than 1,500 international investment agreements (IIAs) are nearing expiry of their initial term, providing an opportunity for termination. Moreover, some states have begun to terminate or denounce investment treaties, while many more are engaging in a process of renegotiation and reform. The Russian case study also highlights the potentially far-reaching effects of a state simply signing a treaty, even many years after the state has expressed its decision to withdraw from it, and notwithstanding tensions with the domestic legal framework.

TREATY TO THE ENERGY CHARTER AS AN INTERNATIONAL LEGAL INSTRUMENT FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENERGY INDUSTRIES

Introduction. This article presents an analysis of the energy policy and its legal framework, in particular the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty. The author detailed the financing and possible risks when investing in this sector, noted other multilateral agreements that emerged from it, such as GATT / WTO, “The Treaty of Rome “, the Agreement on the North American Free Trade Area, MERCOSUR, etc. The article raises the question of the importance of signing international multilateral treaties and discusses ways to adopt them. The article also indicates the possibility of transition to renewable energy sources. Materials and methods. The methodological basis of the research comprised the following general scientific and special methods of cognition of legal phenomena and processes in the field of international trade law: the method of system-structural analysis; method of synthe-sizing social and legal phenomena; comparative legal method; formal-logical method; statistical method. Results. As a result of the analysis, it was revealed that for multilateral energy cooperation it is necessary to rely on an appropriate interstate agreement, which should be based on mutual political views. The article also notes that the condition for the inevitable transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources should be the guarantee that the negative social and economic consequences of such a transition will be minimized. The issue is raised that regional integration based on the norms and rules of the World Trade Organization, strengthening the role of regional reserve currencies is a factor of strengthening competitiveness, security and fi-nancial and economic stability. Discussion and conclusion. It is proved that for the signing of a multilateral, let alone legally binding international agreement, certain political prerequisites, an open “window of opportunity are required, “; the need for effective energy is analyzed; the importance of providing for energy law as a separate branch of law and legislation is indicated; the importance of an energy policy as a source of stability of the sovereignty and integrity of the state, of maintenance and development of the spheres of social and economic provision and welfare of the population is substantiated.

An Overview of Human Rights and Intellectual Property Protection

<p>The purpose of this article is to discuss the legal framework of human rights and intellectual property in terms of state obligations to afford a protection for both human rights and intellectual property. The relationship between intellectual property and human rights, under bilateral, regional and multilateral treaties, is a matter of concern. In focusing on the relationship between intellectual property and human rights, this article argues that there are many challenges on the wide use of Intellectual property rights that given possible conflict between intellectual property and human rights.</p>

The myth of a multilateral framework in international investment law

In past, various attempts at creating a multilateral treaty for the protection of foreign investment have failed. Yet, scholars have tried to fill in the void through theoretical arguments to the effect that even in the absence of a multilateral treaty, the bilateral investment treaties create a multilateral normative framework. This framework imposes external disciplines on States. These theoretical arguments do not find any basis in the treaty text and result into expanding the scope of standards of treatment provided in the bilateral investment treaties (BITs). The first part establishes that States are not ready for a multilateral treaty on investor protection and the reasons for this position based on past experiences. The theoretical arguments used as a substitute for a multilateral treaty have various aspects. It is claimed that the BITs have created a framework which is uniform due to a large number of BITs and consistency in their language. BITs allow corporate restructuring and contain Most Favoured Nation (MFN) clause, which allows any foreign investors to choose the most beneficial BIT to file a claim and most beneficial provision from the all the BITs entered into by the host state. This process is said to have resulted into multilateralization – another form of a multilateral framework. These arguments do violence to the treaty language and stretch the treaty text beyond its purview. The extravagant interpretations proposed by scholars and adopted by tribunals have forced the regime of investment arbitration into an uncertain future.

Investment Arbitration under Multilateral Treaties in the Middle East

Arab claimants seeking to resolve their investment disputes in the Middle East have found variable success in identifying bilateral investment treaties under which to bring their claims. The recent surge in investment arbitration following the political upheavals in the region has prompted unlucky investors to seek out other instruments that provide access to investor-state dispute resolution. Two regional treaties, long dormant as investment instruments, have recently emerged as potential alternatives: the Unified Agreement for the Investment of Arab Capital in the Arab States; and the Agreement on Promotion, Protection and Guarantee of Investments among Member States of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. This article explores the dispute resolution processes, substantive protections, enforcement mechanisms, and availability of state claims and counterclaims under each treaty, as well as the reforms necessary to ensure their present and future viability.

A arbitragem no direito da União Europeia

ABSTRACT: The article deals with arbitration in the European Union (EU) Law and, in addition, some practical aspects concerning the exercise of arbitration within the territorial space of member states. It is particularly emphasized treaty arbitration vis-à-vis the recent and important attribution to the EU of exclusive competence to negotiate and enter into any treaty arbitration between member states or with any third state country, preventing the member states to, without prior permission by the EU, to enter into any bilateral or multilateral investment treaty. Also, the article deals with dispute resolution in the area of energy.

Can everyone help verify the bioweapons convention? Perhaps, via open source monitoring

ABSTRACTThe Biological Weapons Convention is the only multilateral treaty to ban an entire class of weapons of mass destruction, and it officially acknowledges no offensive bioweapons programs or stockpiles anywhere in the world. However, it also has no verification mechanism, relying instead on voluntary reporting from its 175 members, only about 40% of which participate. (Of those, only some 30 nations make their reporting public.) It might therefore be worth exploring alternative means of building transparency and confidence, specifically through the collection and analysis of information about compliance from the wide variety of public sources available right now to anyone with an Internet connection. Efforts to responsibly sort and analyze this information, and to use it to develop productive questions for the convention and its members, will admittedly require some expertise, but it is certainly available as well.

Looming Threat of Chemical and Biological Warfare Agents

<p><br />In the recent past, a dramatic shift has been observed in the strategies of warfare from conventional to non-conventional. Now-a-days, traditional power is of less importance than it used to be earlier. Weapons of mass destruction, which comprise of nuclear weapons, and chemical and biological warfare agents, are posing a great peril to the world due to their devastating potential. Though, there are several bilateral as well as multilateral treaties to control the use and proliferation of these weapons, yet the risk of use of such agents by non-state actors cannot be overlooked. Chances of use of chemical and biological agents are more likely than the nuclear weapons. A comparison of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in terms of technology, cost, signature, effectiveness on protected and un-protected troops shows that chemical and biological weapon programmes require much lower level of technology and cost than the nuclear weapon programme. Further, there is no or least distinctive and readily observable signature in biological weapon programme in comparison to nuclear and chemical weapon facilities. There can be two possibilities of use of these agents in terrorist attacks. First, there is a risk of transfer of material or know-how of these weapons to terrorists for using against the adversaries and second, the risk of these agents being pilfered due to poor security, thereby sabotaging the national security. The International Committee of Red Cross in February 1918 reckoned these agents as ‘barbarous inventions’ that can ‘only be called criminal’.</p>

Международно-правовое регулирование сотрудничества Российской Федерации с сопредельными государствами в Арктике на основе двусторонних договоров

The modern Law of the Arctic regime is administered both at the international law and national law levels. International legal regulation of the Arctic regime is exercised at the level of international multilateral and bilateral treaties. Multilateral treaties are aimed primarily to legal relations that govern the regime of Arctic maritime areas, as well as the decision of environmental issues in the region. Bilateral treaties are aimed to regulate the cross-border problems of neighboring countries. First of all, it means resolving contentious issues of delimitation of maritime areas of the Arctic, cooperation in the field of fisheries and mineral resources. Bilateral treaties are binding only for their members and do not create obligations for third countries. In some cases there are collisions between international bilateral and multilateral agreements on matters relating to the delimitation of neighboring maritime areas. Determination of the effectiveness of existing in the Arctic region international treaties and of their future development needs to be monitored.

Toward Modelling a Global Social Contract: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke

AbstractThe paper attempts to construct a global model of a social contract using well-known metaphors of two great philosophers: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke. By modelling a global social contract, I mean the formulation of a social contract using two sets of data: one is global citizens' preferences about values and norms while the other is sovereign states' participation in multilateral treaties. Both Rousseau and Locke formulate their versions of social contract theories in the national context of eighteenth-century Europe. This paper tries my hands on extending their theories to the global context. This paper attempts to link empirically the relationship between global citizens' preferences as gauged by the World Values Survey and sovereign states' participation in 120 multilateral treaties deposited to the United Nations. To see the link between citizens and treaties (quasi-legislative outcomes, sort of), dimensional similarities of the cosmos of citizens' preference and the cosmos of sovereign states' willingness to join multilateral treaties are examined. Once done, all the sovereign states are located in each of the two cosmoses, citizens and states, and the correlation coefficients between them are measured. Based on these empirical results, the nature of the global quasi-legislative process is clarified. Conclusions and implications are drawn.

Fighting Software Piracy: Some Global Conditional Policy Instruments

This study examines the efficiency of tools for fighting software piracy in the conditional distributions of software piracy. Our paper examines software piracy in 99 countries for the period 1994-2010, using contemporary and non-contemporary quantile regressions. The intuition for modelling distributions contingent on existing levels of software piracy is that the effectiveness of tools against piracy may consistently decrease or increase simultaneously with increasing levels of software piracy. Hence, blanket policies against software piracy are unlikely to succeed unless they are contingent on initial levels of software piracy and tailored differently across countries with low, medium and high levels of software piracy. Our findings indicate that GDP per capita, research and development expenditure, main intellectual property laws, multilateral treaties, bilateral treaties, World Intellectual Property Organisation treaties, money supply and respect of the rule of law have negative effects on software piracy. Equitably distributed wealth reduces software piracy, and the tendency not to indulge in software piracy because of equitably distributed wealth increases with increasing software piracy levels. Hence, the negative degree of responsiveness of software piracy to changes in income levels is an increasing function of software piracy. Moreover the relationships between policy instruments and software piracy display various patterns, namely: U-shape, Kuznets-shape, S-shape and negative thresholds. A negative threshold represents negative estimates with increasing negative magnitude throughout the conditional distributions of software piracy. We also discuss the policy implications of our study.

Outcomes of the 2010 & 2015 Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conferences

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, aka “the Non-Proliferation Treaty” currently stands as the “only binding commitment in a multilateral treaty to the goal of disarmament.” Recent review conferences of the treaty have been dubbed disappointing and even failures. The objective of this treatise is to examine the impacts of these developments are in the context of rational deterrence theory and organizational deterrence theory.

DO WE STILL NEED A CONVENTION IN THE FIELD OF HARMONISATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCIAL LAW

The paper critically discusses the opinion of certain scholars that the use of multilateral treaties (conventions) in the field of harmonisation of international commercial law has been in a state of steady decline. They believe that traditional treaty law has been gradually replaced in recent years by softer methods of making international law, such as the use of restatements and model laws. Some scholars even claim that treaty law is dead or dying. The work assesses whether this view has reasonable grounds, providing an overview of the most prominent hard law and soft law harmonising instruments and outlining issues relating to the success of conventions, their advantages, drawbacks and tensions arising in this area. The paper suggests that conventions remain necessary where the third party or public interest are at stake, however, further improvements are needed to make conventions more successful instruments in international commercial law.

Państwowość Republiki San Marino – geneza i ewolucja

The paper presents the history and the political status of the oldest surviving sovereign state and constitutional republic in the word. The authorvproves that independence depends on foreign relations policy, multilateral treaties and pacts.

Directions of Korean Policy under the Multilateral Tax Treaty Designed by the BEPS Action Plan

Directions of Korean Policy under the Multilateral Tax Treaty Designed by the BEPS Action Plan

Indonesia & Thailand: “Maltreatment”/ “Forced Labor”/ “TIP” in fisheries in Indonesia/Thailand

This article focuses on “trafficking in persons” (TIP) in fisheries in Indonesia and Thailand. This The article refers to key international instruments on TIP and continues by discussing recent cases of TIP in fisheries in Indonesia that were reported in the first half of year 2015. It also explores national domestic legislation of Indonesia and Thailand in relation of measures to combat trafficking in the region. Bilateral and multilateral treaties such as the Treaty between the Government of the Kingdom of Thailand and the Government of the Republic of Indonesia Relating to Extradition and the ASEAN Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters are also addressed as cooperation tools which should be used by Indonesia and Thailand in prosecuting traffickers. To attain success in prosecuting law breakers and to be fair to all concerned, the author discourages those who are preoccupied with TIP from prejudging all unlawful acts as incidents of TIP since many of them might not fall under the criteria of TIP. Additionally, the article addresses the U.S. Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, which classifies countries under one of the tiers stipulated therein. The author indirectly suggests that, via the Act, the U.S. puts pressure upon other countries to intensively suppress TIP and properly protect victims of TIP. Therefore, the author urges Indonesia and Thailand to take special care in handling incidents of TIP in fisheries.