Visiting Scholars Forum

Visiting Scholar Lyra Cela, a PhD Candidate at Bocconi University, presents on "Judicializing ISDS: From Ad Hoc ISDS to a Multilateral Investment Court." This event is open to students, faculty, and staff.

Investor–State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) is the mechanism most commonly embedded in investment treaties that allows a foreign investor to bring a claim directly against a host State in a neutral forum, typically through binding international arbitration, to enforce the State’s investment-protection obligations. Over time, ISDS has faced a legitimacy crisis driven by persistent critiques of high costs and long duration, limited diversity, and inconsistent, unpredictable, and sometimes contested decision-making.

This presentation situates UNCITRAL Working Group III’s reform negotiations within that crisis and surveys leading reform options, from procedural/cross-cutting improvements to institutional redesign. The focus is on the judicialization of ISDS: the move away from ad hoc, party-appointed tribunals toward standing adjudicatory bodies. In line with this trajectory, UNCITRAL Working Group III has advanced draft statutes for a permanent first-instance tribunal and a permanent appellate tribunal, prepared as protocols to a draft multilateral instrument, raising foundational design choices about independence, appointments, jurisdiction, and how a permanent court would interact with existing treaty arbitration.

This presentation draws on my ongoing PhD dissertation, From Investor–State Dispute Settlement to Institutionalized Adjudication: Assessing the Shift Towards Judicialization in International Investment Law, which examines the structural and normative implications of moving from ad hoc arbitral mechanisms to standing, court-like institutions in investment treaty dispute settlement.