On 7-8 September 2023, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) and the Singapore Ministry of Law, with the support of the Centre for International Law (CIL), jointly organised the Sixth Intersessional Meeting of Working Group III held at the Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre, Singapore. The mandate of Working Group III is to develop reforms to the existing regime of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). To this end, Government officials formally meet several times a year at the Working Group’s formal sessions, as well as during periodic intersessional meetings.

The Sixth Intersessional Meeting focused on a proposed standing multilateral mechanism and appellate mechanism for ISDS. It comprised a series of panel discussions open to the public, allowing informal dialogue between delegates and stakeholders, aimed at facilitating further discussion in the Working Group.

Issues discussed in the meeting included the structure, scope and governance of the proposed standing mechanism, its composition and the procedure of appointing adjudicators, as well as its compatibility with the ICSID Convention (establishing the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes). Professor N. Jansen Calamita, Head, Investment Law & Policy at CIL, moderated the final panel of the intersessional on the standing mechanism’s key implementation and enforcement issues. He was joined by Meg Kinnear, ICSID Secretary-General; Laurence Bielen, Policy Advisor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belgium; and Professor Chester Brown of the University of Sydney. The speakers offered their views on the enforceability of decisions made by the standing mechanism and how they can fit within the enforcement regime under ICSID and the 1958 New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards.

CIL also organised a side-event during the intersessional meeting on practical tools for dispute avoidance, moderated by Professor N. Jansen Calamita (report available here).

About 80 states were represented at the meeting, with about 60 delegates present on site and nearly 170 remotely connected. CIL has been an official observer to Working Group III since 2017, when the Working Group was entrusted with the mandate to work on the possible reform of ISDS. The Working Group will continue its deliberations on other elements of its agenda, namely on the establishment of an advisory centre on international investment law and on rules of procedure and cross-cutting issues, from 9 to 13 October 2023 in Vienna. Discussions on the proposed standing multilateral mechanism will continue at the January 2024 session of Working Group III.

The full programme and informal documents prepared for the Sixth Intersessional Meeting of Working Group III are available here.