PUBLISHED: MAY 2008

In this paper published by ICNL, two internationally-renowned experts analyze the protections that civil society organizations receive under international investment treaties.

It profiles the features of these international investment treaties and offers a preliminary assessment of how – and to what extent – the protections of these agreements might be relevant to not-for-profit organizations who have suffered deprivations, interferences, and various forms of abuse at the hands of host governments. While these investment treaties were not conceived primarily as instruments for protecting not-for-profit actors, many such agreements do afford potentially significant international law protection to such actors. In so doing, they represent a useful supplement to the patchy framework of international human rights law and international not-for-profit law.