Our "Investment protection and arbitration" team is a part of Lovells' leading Dispute Resolution practice, which has a long and distinguished record of representing both corporations and states in major disputes before international tribunals. Its members have proven experience of conducting international law disputes in the field of investment protection and are able to offer advice in the languages of each of the major legal systems in the world.
Most investment protection under international law is based on the approximately 2000 Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) that are currently in force worldwide, traditionally between capital-exporting and capital-importing states, and on a handful of regional multilateral investment treaties. In these instruments, the contracting states enter into particular obligations regarding the treatment of investments made by investors of the other contracting state.
A particular feature of many BITs and the multilateral investment treaties is that the contracting states consent to provide an investor with the possibility of proceeding directly against the host state before an international arbitral tribunal with a juridical seat in a third state. This gives the investor an unusual right to bring a treaty claim against the host state directly and in its own name under public international law.
The choice of dispute resolution fora depends upon the terms of the consent in the treaty. These comprise those fora already familiar to users of international commercial arbitration, namely ad hoc (e.g. UNCITRAL) or arbitration under the rules and administration of particular dedicated institutions (e.g. ICC, LCIA, SCC). In addition, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), affiliated with the World Bank, provides its own set of rules and administration for investment disputes.
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