The Investors’ International Law Workshop was held on 17 and 18 January 2019 at the NUS Law Bukit Timah Campus.
This two-day workshop was convened by Assistant Professor Jean Ho ’03 (NUS Law) and Dr Mavluda Sattorova (Reader in International Economic Law, Liverpool University, School of Law & Social Justice) to study the use of international law as a sword by States and other injured stakeholders. Current scholarship adopts the foregone conclusion that international law at present lacks remedies and a remedial forum for investor wrongdoing, and focuses on proposing or critiquing reforms on substantive rules and dispute settlement, and incentivising responsible business conduct. As a result, the relevance of and reliance on existing regimes, models and avenues of redress remain undertheorised and underexplored.
Understanding how international law and its various sub-fields, as they stand, can be invoked to target investor wrongdoing has never been more urgent or critical at a time when change is the by-product of constant, rapid, and unpredictable political crises, volte face, and compromise. This workshop disengages from familiar refrains of investor protection, focusing instead on the untapped promise of investor accountability.