How lucky was your St. Paddy’s day this year? Likely, it brought more good fortune than you think.
In the modern world we live in, full of high-tech information sharing and copious globalized trade, one might assume transparency measures to be a given aspect of international exchange. The fact of the matter is that such a statement is only partially true—CIEL and other worldwide organizations have been working for years to convince the United Nations to implement measures that would protect the fundamental human rights to information, participation, and justice of international traders and consumers alike.
March 17 2014 marked a true milestone in international trade transparency. The Mauritius Convention on Transparency resulted in the development of new, exciting UN litigation: signatories under the Mauritius Convention voluntarily agreed to observe and uphold transparency policies that would have otherwise been irrelevant to a multitude of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs).
Back in October 2012, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Working Group II on arbitration and conciliation (WG) negotiated the Transparency Rules, a legal standard for transparency in treaty-based investor-state arbitration that would be adopted in 2013. The new standards dictated public access to hearings and documents during arbitral disputes; this access is often crucial if community members feel that trade threatens to violate their rights.
Sounds great, right? We thought so too—but UNCITRAL’s revised Transparency Rules did not apply to pre-existing trade agreements unless both parties explicitly opted for their application. Later in 2013, a panel of federal US judges deemed legal the US Trade Representative’s refusal to share a document that would clarify exactly how the US interprets language pertaining to investor rights in the Free Trade of the Americas trade agreement. It seemed that all of CIEL’s work in advocating of transparency may as well have disappeared.
Leprechauns or no, we weren’t giving up: CIEL and other NGOs continued placing pressure on the United Nations to construct a much-needed fortitude of international trade transparency policy.
The Mauritius Convention, held in Mauritius, closely followed December 2014 UNCITRAL negotiations. Using the Mauritius Convention, States can easily apply the Transparency Rules to BITs initiated prior to the April 1, 2014 cut off. If both States engaged in a pre-April 2014 BIT sign the Mauritius, the Transparency Rules will automatically apply to the BIT. If only one State engaged in a pre-April 2014 BIT signs the Mauritius Convention, that State can make an offer to the non-Party country to agree to employ the Transparency Rules to that BIT.
So far, 8 States including Mauritius, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States have signed the Mauritius Convention, and many are expected to add their names in coming weeks; once three States ratify the Convention, it will become law.
Originally posted on March 23, 2015. Update on the Mauritius Convention as of February 7, 2017 here.