‘India can tweak treaties with key countries for quick fixes’
NEW DELHI : India has the mechanisms to tweak bilateral investment treaties for quick resolution of disputes with “strategically important countries", an official aware of the development said, outlining what would mark a significant moderation of New Delhi’s long-held suspicion of such treaties as weighted against it. The official’s remarks come as India parallelly negotiates bilateral investment treaties (BIT)—along with free trade agreements—with the UK and EU, which seek better investment protection and faster resolution of disputes.
Leading New Delhi’s push, commerce minister Piyush Goyal is currently in the UK to speed up negotiations on the BIT. India has so far stuck to its position favouring ‘local remedies’ to resolve investment-related legal disputes rather than agree to independent international arbitration after some high-profile losses.
After economic liberalization in the 90s, India signed over 80 such treaties that are aimed at promoting foreign direct investments. But following a spate of disputes that led to adverse rulings and multi-billion-dollar awards against India, the government in 2017 dialled down on the BITs it had signed, denouncing the bulk of them.
New Delhi now insisted that all BITs have to be renegotiated using a template provided by a model treaty that favours state rights over investor rights. Among the most high-profile investor-state disputes that India lost was one with the British telecom giant Vodafone in an international arbitration tribunal at The Hague.
Similar adverse rulings in cases of Cairn Energy and Devas Multimedia resulted in changes in India’s BIT strategy, with New Delhi now insisting on first exhausting Indian courts before going for international arbitration. “We
. Read more on livemint.com
