Taylor St John
Taylor St John is a Researcher at PluriCourts, University of Oslo, on leave from her position as Lecturer in International Relations, University of St Andrews. Her monograph, The Rise of Investor-State Arbitration: Politics, Law, and Unintended Consequences, was published in 2018. She previously held positions at PluriCourts, the London School of Economics, and Oxford, where she received a DPhil. Taylor attends UNCITRAL as an observer from iCourts, University of Copenhagen.
It is not business as usual in investment dispute resolution these days. In late April 2018 in New York, governments and experts met under the auspices of UNCITRAL Working Group IIIto continue vigorously debating how investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) should be reformed or replacedby an investment court. This is not the first investment court proposal, however.
On 19 July 2019, China submitted its proposal on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) reform to UNCITRAL. A Chinese version is available, though an English translation is yet to be posted. China reaffirms its commitment to ISDS as an important mechanism for resolving investor-state disputes under public international law. However, it takes note of significant…
As observers of the UNCITRAL process, we watch the debates with great interest, writing about the emergence of different camps, giving perspectives on how the process fits within broader geopolitical developments, and offering potential models for moving forward. One thing that we are often struck by is how some of the field’s underlying narratives are…
In UNCITRAL, states have broken through the impasse of the incrementalist and systemic reformer camps. They have all agreed that they want to pursue systemic reform, but they have different ideas about what that entails and what to prioritise. In broad terms, agreement seems to be coalescing around three main blocks of reforms: updating some of…