Are the protections offered by EU law adequate alternatives to those offered by international investment law?

Gáspár-Szilágyi, Szilárd ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7204-406X 2025. Are the protections offered by EU law adequate alternatives to those offered by international investment law? Journal of International Dispute Settlement 16 (1) , idae022. 10.1093/jnlids/idae022

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Abstract

This article, within the Special Issue’s ‘Justice beyond investor-state dispute settlement’ theme, looks at whether the protections offered by European Union (EU) law are adequate alternatives to those offered by international investment law (IIL) in the post-Achmea world of intra-EU investment protection. While EU law offers far-reaching protections to businesses operating in the EU, sometimes going beyond the protections offered by IIL, from an investment law perspective the article argues that not all the substantive and procedural protections offered by EU law are adequate for the purposes of IIL. This is because investment law has a narrower focus on protecting and promoting investments, which in turn influences how the legal provisions are interpreted. EU law, on the other hand, has the much broader and deeper purpose of creating an ‘ever-closer’ Union with an internal market, a ‘systemic’ purpose that permeates the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)’s interpretation of EU law. Thus, the deeper we look, the more differences we find in the personal and material scope of the two systems, the substantive standards of treatment, the derogations from the substantive standards, and the procedural protections and remedies. Coming full circle, the different epistemic communities of adjudicators, just like the different purposes and objectives, result in similar or the same concepts being interpreted differently. It is quite unfortunate that the CJEU viewed these two systems as competitors, in which investor–State arbitration ‘removed’ cases from the jurisdiction of EU Member State courts, when in fact they are complementary systems of protection.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Cardiff Law & Politics
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	2040-3585
Last Modified:	15 Jan 2026 12:31
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/183521

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