Thank you, Mr. Goldring.
I'm not sure I can answer the last question in terms of how many business opportunities were prevented, although it's a good question to ask as a rhetorical question, absolutely.
What was the delay? I can't speak to why the six prime ministers we've had since 1966 and their various governments didn't choose to ratify and implement ICSID--well, sign, initially; we only signed it, as you pointed out, less than a year ago.
There are a bunch of considerations. I think one of the things is that for the first close to 30 years of ICSID's existence there was very little activity under ICSID. I gave a talk about a year ago in London on a related topic, to do with international trade investment law. I'd gone through the case law. The point I made is that from 1966 to 1996, the first 30 years of the convention, a handful of disputes--I can't remember if it was 23, or 27, or 29--had gone through the ICSID process.
Since the mid-nineties, in the past 10 years, as you heard from Meg Kinnear, we've had 200 or thereabouts. That's a tenfold increase in the last 10 years relative to the first 30 years. If you start doing the arithmetic, that is a 30- or 40-fold increase.
I think part of the reason was that it was a nice thing to have, but really, what were we losing? If you were looking at this in 1970: “What, six disputes? How many opportunities have we missed?” If you look at in 1980: “Fourteen disputes? Well, whatever.”
There may have been an element of that kind of pure legislative, government--