Litigating the Crisis: Towards a Rebalancing of the Rights of Investors Versus Public Interest?

This chapter reflects on the anticipated rush by private corporations to seek compensation from states for emergency measures taken to address the current health crisis. Where states have, for example, commandeered privately run health facilities, foreign corporations can claim for any negative impact on their current and future profits. This anticipated wave of state-investor litigation draws upon the web of bilateral investment treaties that span the globe and on Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms. In place of a “new normal,” this short paper suggests that these threats represent an intensification of an existing trend, with the main difference being that states of the Global North are increasingly finding themselves disciplined by instruments that they created to protect their own companies abroad. If this happens, as seems likely, this crisis will add to the growing calls to rethink how we regulate the boundary between the public interest and private investors.