Reforming the International Investment Agreements Regime

More than 50 key stakeholders, including chief IIA negotiators of many countries, from North and South, from East and West, senior business representatives, as well as representatives from relevant inter-governmental organisations and civil society attended the IIA Conference “Reforming the International Investment Agreements Regime” at the World Investment Forum 2014 on 16 October to address the challenges arising from international investment agreements (IIAs) and consider ways to reform the international investment policy regime. Participants engaged in real-time and cutting-edge interaction between IIA experts from all around the globe that will shape the reform of the IIA regime and investment dispute settlement towards sustainable development objectives. The statements presented at the conference can be found below.

The IIA Conference focused on the following main questions

• What are the key areas and pressing issues in IIAs and investment dispute settlement that need to be addressed?
• What are the key ways and means to address these issues?
• What types of mechanisms and platforms are needed to facilitate the reform?

Through all of this, the IIA Conference generated four concrete outcomes

• Agreement that the regime of IIAs and related dispute settlement need to be reformed in a comprehensive and gradual way, taking into account the interests of a all stakeholders.
• Identification of pressing issues in IIAs and investment dispute settlement that need to be addressed and ways and means to do this.
• Development of the contours of a roadmap for the reform of the IIA regime.
• Recognition that individual reform efforts are useful but not sufficient and that only a joint, multilateral effort can be truly effective.

The debate continued at UNCTAD Expert Meeting on 25-27 February 2015 in Geneva, Switzerland.