International Investment Law

With the recent decision by the African Heads of States to adopt the Protocol on Investment to the Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area, Dr Dominic Dagbanja’s monograph on The Investment Treaty Regime and Public interest in Africa is a welcome addition to the growing list of monographs on Africa’s foreign investment law regimes. This book which is a based on Dr Dagbanja’s 2015 doctoral dissertation provides an original contribution to existing literature by focusing on the constitutionality of investment treaties. It deals with themes and issues which are critical for understanding Africa’s complex foreign investment protection and promotion laws. Although scholars have examined the linkages between constitutional law and international investment law notably using case studies from Europe and Latin America, this is the first monograph to focus on this issue from an African perspective.

A fundamental premise of The Investment Treaty Regime and Public Interest Regulation in Africa is that national constitutions “are supreme in the hierarchy of legal norms within the domestic context, and governmental actions in Africa, including the making of investment treaties, are governed by these fundamental legal norms.” In this monograph, I addressed, then, the question of the limits that national constitutions and the right of African states to regulate in international law place on the authority of African states in their conclusion of international economic treaties such as investment treaties. I examined four different and fundamental areas of public interest: national judicial systems, the environment, human rights, and development. Based on a constitutional-general international law imperatives analysis, I developed the imperatives theory as a theoretical framework to explain the conflict of legal norms and interests through a critical analysis of the intersections of public law and policy and international investment treaties. The issue addressed by the imperatives theory is whether the fundamental human rights and corresponding obligations of African states towards citizens under African constitutions, international environmental treaties and international human rights treaties do place or should place, limitations on the competence of African states to conclude investment treaties the terms of which constrain the exercise of the states’ public interest regulatory authority.

The workshop aims to gather scholars and practitioners interested in exploring - theoretically, doctrinally, empirically, comparatively, critically, and otherwise - the nature of international investment contracts in different contexts and its implications for elaborating transnational standards.

The aim of this post is to illustrate how the MIC can be used as a tool for harmonising international investment law (IIL) with general international law and other branches of international law. The increase in investor state arbitrations has led to a growing increase in the overlap between investment obligations and environmental, human rights and other international obligations. This may cause conflicts between the different branches of international law where more than one branch of international law is implicated in the investment dispute. This has led to the fragmentation of international law with calls to rebalance the system to allow for the consideration of broader public international law in the settlement of investor-state disputes.

The webinar brings two together the authors of two new books on the subject of international investment law in Africa and three expert panelists to interrogate thematic issues that arise from the books; their implication for contemporary practices of international investment law in Africa and beyond; and what insights we may draw on them for the future of the regimes on investment law in Africa.

This book emerged from the observation that in international law scholarship, few studies have been done on Africa as both object and subject of international law despite the involvement of African states and Africans in the international arena and their active participation in many debates. To fill this gap by examining, sixty years after the independence of African states, the place of Africa in international law and the way international law looks at Africa is the challenge that the contributors to this book, all internationalists of the 1980-1990 generation, have taken up. The book highlights the specificity of a particular African law and examines the African experience in this fi eld from an international law perspective.

Can the ambitious dream of the African Renaissance be brought to fruition? Can peace and prosperity be fulfilled? What role can international investment law play in helping African peoples tackle the challenges to Africa’s growth and prosperity? The conference aims to address these questions seeing Africa as a continent of hope and emancipation. It constitutes a platform to critically assess the promises and pitfalls of existing investment treaties and build momentum for dialogue on the future of Africa.

This public event is hosted by Afronomicslaw.org – the leading forum on international economic law issues relating to Africa, and Open Society Policy Center. This hybrid event will be streamed live on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter handles of Afronomicslaw.org.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) aims to achieve the expansion of intra- African trade through the harmonisation and coordination of trade liberalisation and facilitation across Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and Africa in general and "enhance competitiveness at the industry and enterprise level through exploiting opportunities for scale production, continental market access and better reallocation of resources". Negotiations for the Phase II Protocols of the AfCFTA are ongoing. Of particular importance to this paper will be the Protocol on Investment which is currently under negotiation. This paper will focus on how the Investment Protocol can contribute to promoting sustainable development on the African continent.

Contemporary scholarship on international investment law (IIL) in Africa has emphasised the 'Africanization' of IIL. This article argues that the presence of a cross-cutting policy vision in the Africanization of IIL should not be viewed as its conceptual sine qua non but as a significant challenge to its end goals.