Sheng Zhang, Hao Cheng, Shikhar Vashishth, Cliff Wong, Jinfeng Xiao, Xiaodong Liu, Tristan Naumann, Jianfeng Gao, Hoifung Poon. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022. 2022.

The establishments of international commercial courts reflect the closer alignment of commercial transactions and the development of dispute resolution mechanisms. To mainly facilitate the developments of the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, China established the China international commercial court (CICC) in 2018. It marked a significant step in the development of China’s judicial system. However, compared with other international commercial courts in the world, the construction of the CICC still has much room for improvement in the areas of jurisdiction, internationalization, and the recognition and enforcement of judgments. The China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) needs to consider how to refine the working procedures, enhance the internationalization, and promote the recognition and enforcement of the awards by the CICC. The SPC may need to update the current legal regime for the CICC based on the operation and the experience of trials. In addition to the efforts of the SPC to pave the way for developments, China needs to consider modifying the relevant rules and actively expand its judicial cooperation with other countries.

The current international investment treaty network is not well suited to climate goals. The tension stems from the fact that “old generation” of international investment agreements were concluded before the widespread climate action and they were “climate neutral” or “climate blind”. This study explores the obstacles for international investment agreements and investment arbitration to tackle climate change issues, indicating the need for reform. Despite the fact that some states have begun to reform their international investment agreements in light of climate change, there are still many shortcomings to be addressed. The current international investment agreement regime should be reformed to incorporate climate change considerations for investment arbitration to contribute to climate change mitigation. According to the findings, updating investment treaties based on a climate-oriented model would be a viable option for states.

Although an increasing number of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) now incorporate the concept of sustainable development, direct reference to human rights is still rare and remains embryonic. A close look at the positions held by some representative groups and countries, including the European Union (EU), the USA, China, India, South Africa, and Mercosur, reveals that the reference to human rights features divergence. The divided positions held by these groups or countries reveal the difficulties of operationalizing human rights obligations into international investment rule making. Even among developed countries or economies, a consistent approach to human rights is yet to be found. Based on these observations, this article proposes a number of pragmatic solutions to bridge the gap between these divided positions. In order to synergize international investment treaty regimes on human rights, internal engagement, including the reform of BIT dispute settlement regimes, and external engagement, including dialogues among stakeholders, should be made.