International Trade committee  The primary basis for those concerns relates to the award of monetary damages against countries when decisions are taken by a legislature, by a government, by a court, that affect detrimentally the foreign investor and are found by the arbitrators to have breached some broad stan

International Trade committee  You can call me Gus.

International Trade committee  I'm sorry?

International Trade committee  Well, I'm an academic researcher, and that's always my aspiration, yes.

International Trade committee  I do. I've never been involved in politics. I don't have any aspirations to get into politics.

International Trade committee  I have been a member of—

International Trade committee  I have donated to four different political parties in my life, including the NDP.

International Trade committee  It would depend on the arbitration rules under which the investor chose to bring the claim. Most treaties give investors a choice of rules. If the investor brought the claim under the ICSID rules, there's an opportunity for so-called annulment proceedings, which are quite light t

International Trade committee  No, it's widely held among academics that there's not an adequate appellate mechanism. Some people prefer an appellate body; I personally prefer a proper court, but I think it's widely regarded as requiring a more rigorous appellate process.

International Trade committee  There are concerns. I have expressed those concerns in some of the work that I've done. What you have here is a very exceptional context when arbitration is used to resolve some of the most sensitive public policy and public law issues that can arise in any country. Those issues

International Trade committee  Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you. First, I'd like to say a word of caution: it's difficult to evaluate any treaty without looking at the text, and I understand that negotiations haven't been concluded, so the text isn't available. I will just make it clear that I ha

International Trade committee  Yes, I can.

International Trade committee  On the second question, this is the practice of forum shopping or round-tripping. In forum shopping, you set up a holding company in a third state in order to gain access to that state's investment treaty to sue the state in which you own assets. That's common in investment treat

International Trade committee  There's one other publicly known settlement, which is the Ethyl settlement, very early in the NAFTA experience. The United States has never settled a case. On Mr. Shrybman's comments, as a matter of international law, for example, NAFTA itself defines assets extraordinarily broa

International Trade committee  Yes. What's significant that the tribunals give interpretations to broad language of standards in the treaties. So the tribunals interpret what a very important concept of indirect expropriation or regulatory expropriation means. They interpret what is discriminatory. They interp