Protection of Foreign Investments in Türkiye under International Law: Alignments and Dissociations with International Tendencies

Protection of foreign investments under international law is treaty-based. Investment treaties are mostly bilateral, i.e. they are concluded between two states and provide the investors of each contracting party rights to a minimum standard of treatment in the territory of the other contracting party. Foreign investments in Türkiye, too, are protected by bilateral investment treaties. Türkiye has concluded a total of 132 bilateral investment treaties with 113 different states. As of today, 82 of these bilateral investment treaties are in force. We examined all bilateral investment treaties that Türkiye has been party to, including those that have not entered into force yet and those that have entered into force but that were subsequently terminated. We, thus, sought to determine how Türkiye established and developed its bilateral investment treaty network. In order to get a complete picture of the establishment and development of the Turkish network, we compared it with international tendencies of bilateral investment treaty network establishment programmes. As a result of this comparison, we determined that Türkiye’s bilateral investment treaty network mostly aligned with international tendencies, especially between 1960 and 2000. We observed that Türkiye behaved more like developing and transition economies in this time period; hence it first concluded investment treaties with investment exporting states. However, we remarked a dissociation from international tendencies in the 2010s. As a result of our examination of the Turkish bilateral investment treaty practice in the 2010s, we made the following findings: Türkiye did not align with the tendency to withdraw from the network of investment treaties, a tendency popular among developing and transition economies, and it mostly dissociated from the tendency to replace existing investment treaties with new generation treaties, a tendency pioneered by developed economies.