View video of the talk here.
This talk by Mislav Mataija, International Visiting Professor of Law, and hosted by CCSI and the Columbia International Arbitration Association (CIAA), examined the evolution of the restraints imposed by EU law, as interpreted by the European Court of Justice, on investment protection provisions in bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and free trade agreements (FTAs) concluded by the European Union and/or its Member States. Two recent judgments of the Court have raised alarms in some quarters, suggesting that the EU may not be able to conclude agreements that include investor-State dispute settlement without additional ratification by its Member States (the Singapore opinion) and that ISDS provisions in existing BITs between EU Member States are outright illegal (Achmea). A third, upcoming decision – the Opinion in CETA – might settle the broader question of whether the EU can negotiate ISDS provisions with third countries at all. This talk outlined the main issues on which that decision may hinge, and provided a broader overview of how EU law on investment protection has reached this point.
About Mislav Mataija:
As a member of the Commission’s Legal Service, Mataija litigates World Trade Organization disputes on behalf of the European Union, and advises the European Commission on trade law matters. He also represents the European Commission in litigation before the European Court of Justice in various areas of European Union law, and is a visiting professor at Sciences Po School of Public Affairs in Paris.
He holds a law degree from the University of Zagreb, and is a Croatian qualified lawyer. During his LLM at Columbia Law School, he was a Fulbright Scholar and a James Kent Scholar. He completed a PhD in European Union law at the European University Institute in Florence. He published a monograph based on his Ph.D. research, entitled “Private Regulation and the Internal Market: Sports, Legal Services, and Standard Setting in EU Economic Law”, with Oxford University Press in 2016.
He has published and taught extensively in European Union and international law. Prior to Sciences Po, he taught at the Catholic Universities of Lille and Lyon, worked as a researcher at the European University Institute Centre for Judicial Cooperation, and for a number of years as a lecturer at the Jean Monnet Department of European Public Law at the University of Zagreb. He gave invited lectures at a number of institutions, including Columbia Law School (2017), King’s College London, Tilburg University, University of Antwerp, Cambridge University, University of Murcia, and the European Court of Justice.
