On 7 September 2023, CIL organised a side-event at the UNCITRAL Sixth Intersessional Meeting of Working Group III held in Singapore (report available here), entitled “Practical Tools for the Avoidance of Investor-State Disputes: an UNCITRAL Working Group III Priority”.

The panel was moderated by Professor N. Jansen Calamita, Head, Investment Law & Policy, at CIL. Discussants on the panel were Ms Young Shin Um, Senior Deputy Director, International Dispute Settlement Division, Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Korea, and Ms Lai Thị Vân Anh, Deputy Director General, Department of International Law of the Ministry of Justice of Viet Nam.

Professor Calamita started by providing general remarks on dispute avoidance, highlighting that the application of investment treaty obligations often falls to frontline officials who may often be unaware or not well equipped to take account of the state’s obligations. As a result, states can be exposed to increased risk of violating their international commitments and, in turn, the negative effects that disputes with investors can bring.

Dispute avoidance is a whole-of-government concern, Professor Calamita emphasised, as he outlined a range of policies and procedures that states have employed to address the challenges posed by investment treaties. In that context, the discussion focused particularly on the development and use of government handbooks designed to provide non-specialist officials with practical explanations of how investment treaty obligations apply to day-to-day government decision making. In 2020, with the support of the Australian government, CIL developed the APEC Handbook on Obligations in International Investment Treaties, a first-of-its-kind international resource for states to use as part of their larger dispute avoidance strategies.

Ms Lai and Ms Um shared their experiences of the development and use of handbooks for government officials as a practical tool to disseminate information about investment treaties to ministry/local officials and to support dispute avoidance strategies more generally. The Republic of Korea was one of the first countries to develop such a handbook and Ms Um shared how it has been part of a larger training strategy on treaty obligations for government officials in Korea. For Viet Nam, the development of a specialised handbook has occurred more recently (with the support of Professor Calamita) and, Ms Lai explained, this handbook has already become a valuable resource in Viet Nam’s efforts to establish a whole-of-government approach to dispute avoidance across the country’s 63 provinces.