Multilateral Investment Court

As corporate influence over public policy at every level of government grows ever greater, measures to hold corporations accountable have not kept pace. Around the world, investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) is heralded as the epitome of this power imbalance. In the name of protecting investor rights, governments are being forced to pay foreign corporations for actions they take in service of the public interest, such as protecting human rights or preventing environmental harm.

In the face of intense and rising public opposition to ISDS throughout Europe and beyond, the European Commission has proposed the creation of a Multilateral Investment Court (MIC) as an alternative to including ISDS within bilateral investment agreements such as the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). Although the proposed court purports to address some of the problems of ISDS (such as providing for full-time tenured judges to address arbitrator bias), proposals to date suggest the Multilateral Investment Court is intended more to rebrand ISDS than to reform it. In fact, the creation of the court would further expand ISDS, entrench investor protections that sit outside and potentially supersede domestic legal and political processes, and perpetuate corporate impunity for human rights and environmental violations.

At the UN Commission for International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), governments have begun to identify problems with ISDS and propose solutions. The EU, Canada, and other states hope that this process will lead to the negotiation of the Multilateral Investment Court.

CIEL is working with other civil society organizations to prevent the creation of a Multilateral Investment Court that would further entrench this undemocratic ISDS scheme, undermine national democratic authority, and prioritize corporate profits above all else. To counter the imbalance between legal remedy for corporate investors (excessive recourse) and the communities that are negatively affected by corporate actions (no recourse), CIEL is working within the mechanisms of the United Nations to strengthen and enforce the human rights obligations of investors, including through the negotiation of a Transnational Corporate Accountability and Human Rights Treaty.

Last updated February 2018