Thread by @AlessandraAster

Thread on some international law stuff.
One of the arguments from those who oppose #RepealTheGRA is that the GRA 2004 caters to a tiny minority of the population and is finely balanced.

Now let's step way back in time. Following the end of WWII, a process of decolonisation started. The economic implications of that process are relevant here. Newly independent countries wanted to nationalise the economic resources of their own land. Sovereignty included resources

Western countries claimed they had acquired those resources legally and at the very least deserved full compensation for those nationalisations, which were a form of expropriation. The battle played out as much at the United Nations General Assembly as outside.

While third world countries fought against the classic compensation standard to be considered a customary law standard, and therefore binding, they were enticed to sign bilateral investment treaties with those same countries they were fighting in the UNGA.

And those treaties of course included the classic compensation standard. While the political battle was raging at the UN, the economic battle was lost.
But this was not enough. Western countries needed a way to enforce those treaties. International law is difficult to enforce.

In 1966, under the aegis of the World Bank, the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes was established in Washington, and the ICSID Convention entered into force. I talk about them here legalform.blog/2017/10/27/gra…

The Convention guaranteed arbitrations under international legal rules. Now Western investors did not have to sue in local courts to vindicate their property rights. Colonialism has many faces and this is legal neo-colonialism.

Like in a chemical reaction, the mix of an international arbitration Convention and bilateral investment treaties protecting investors resulted, almost 20 years after the entry into force of the Convention, to the first treaty arbitration.

Investors could sue States not on the basis of a contract including an arbitration clause, as had always been the case, and as the Convention had been justified, but on the basis of a treaty his own country had entered which included the ICSID as an arbitration facility.

As you can see, a treaty that was dormant for almost 20 years, started generating a growing number of cases. The battle over nationalisation was lost. The standard of compensation is now pretty much the law, thanks to a web of 1000s of investment treaties and ICSID enforcement.

So you see, the GRA may well have been written for a tiny number of people. But the GRA+EA combined created the chemical reaction that brought us rapists in female prisons and the corruption of the judicial process. And that is but one example of its destructive effect.