The streets of Brussels will soon be littered with the tatters of state-investor treaties signed in Europe’s national capitals. The European Union aims to shred the bilateral investment treaties signed by its member nations, both with each other and with the rest of the world. What will replace those treaties, no one quite knows.
The world’s 3,000-plus BITs give foreign investors the right to directly sue a state, if they believe that it has seized their assets or otherwise treated them unfairly. E.U. nations have signed more than half of current BITs, and our 2011 Arbitration Scorecard survey—which counts 151 state-investor arbitrations with stakes of at least $100 million—confirms that E.U. member treaties generate over half the world’s largest investment arbitrations. (That’s why Arbitration Scorecard is published in Focus Europe .)
