Sneaking Through the Backdoor - Reflections on Public Interest in International Investment Arbitration

摘要

We are becoming more and more familiar with a simple but seemingly convincible narrative of international investment law: It is powerful - it bestows non-State actors with international rights that bite, it provides for rather effective mechanisms of international adjudication and enforcement - but it neglects the public interest.1 Whether or not this is a laudable pattern is much disputed and for the sake of this contribution I will leave it at that.2 The oddity that international investment arbitration as well as Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) do not pay much attention to public interest concerns remains noteworthy nonetheless.