National Sovereignty and International Investment Law: Sovereignty Reassertion and Prospects of Reform

The growing tendency among States to terminate their international investment agreements and/or replace them with domestic laws may be understood as a reclamation of national sovereignty vis-à-vis international institutions. The article develops a typology of moves to reassert sovereignty in international investment law, distinguishing: (a) an isolationist reassertion from (b) an international reassertion and in turn from (c) domesticating reassertion. The article further claims that international investment law and its reform needs to be informed by research into domestic systems of governance in order to better conceptualize the ways in which international law principles are implemented alongside and through the use of domestic legal instruments, but also in order to help inform the reform process of international investment law. It finally identifies the ways in which domestic and international law co-exist and mutually influence each other with a view to the substantive and procedural law reform of the investment regime.