Rafal Morek’s post last month, Investor-state disputes: how arbitration and mediation can intertwine to provide more resonant solutions, emphasized the increasing use of mediation to resolve investor-state disputes, albeit still confined to a small number of cases under the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) Convention. As the late Professor Derek Roebuck noted…

Singapore is widely known as a leading centre on the map of international mediation. On 7 August 2019, a signing ceremony for the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation, nowadays commonly known as the Singapore Convention, was held there. On 23 February 2024, Singapore will host the 25th International Bar Association…

Introduction  China’s noticeable absence from ISDS cases raises interesting questions about the resolution of investor-state disputes from a Chinese perspective. So far, there have only been 15 ISDS cases brought on behalf of Chinese investors, with China having been on the receiving end of 9 claims. One might consider these figures very low, when compared,…

This series of blogs posts explores investment mediation from a variety of angles. In this third installment, we explain the primary differences between mediation and conciliation at ICSID. In part one, we explore how to determine whether mediation is an appropriate option for resolving an investment dispute, while part two looked at what mediation is—and…

This series of blogs posts explores investment mediation from a variety of angles. In this second installment, we focus on what mediation is—and how it works—in the context of investment disputes.  In part one, we explore how to determine whether mediation is an appropriate option for resolving an investment dispute, while part three outlines the…

Slowly but surely the dispute resolution landscape is shifting for investment related disputes. More than half the respondents to the International Dispute Resolution Survey published by the Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (SIDRA) last year indicated that they have been involved in an investor-state dispute between 2016 and 2018. And, it is of course no…

The Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (“SIDRA”) issued the global International Dispute Resolution Survey: 2020 Final Report (the “SIDRA Survey”) on 3 July 2020, which studied the preferences, experiences, and perspectives of legal users (lawyers and legal advisers) and client users (corporate executives and in-house counsel) with regard to, among other mechanisms, international commercial mediation….

Interest is growing in the use of mediation for investor-state disputes. Recent webinars on investor-state mediation (including SIDRA’s recent webinar) have explored ICSID’s new investor-state mediation rules, the role of the Singapore Convention for investor-state mediation and the need for further domestic legislation on mediation. Discussions at these virtual conferences have also emphasised the importance…

Over the past decade, the concept of resolving international investment disputes through mediation has gained traction among States, practitioners and academics. This is seen in the significant number of recent investment treaties that refer to mediation either as a pre-condition to arbitration, or as a stand-alone mechanism for resolving disputes. Support for mediation is also…