Investing In Africa Dispute Resolution Mechanism

Africa is becoming a new hot investment field with a more stable and better political environment: on one hand, African governments set out many preferential policies to attracting foreign investment, such as broadening the area of investment and simplifying the approval procedures for foreign investment; on the other hand, foreign investors have realized the improvement of the African investment environment and successively search for a wider access to this unexplored-market. The economic and trade cooperation between China and African are also continuously expanding. Especially since the success of the China-Africa Cooperation Forum Beijing Summit in 2006, Chinese investors have invested much more in Africa and the investment fields have been broadened.The prospect of investing in Africa is very optimistic. However, we should also prudently notice that there are still many uncertain factors——On one hand, there exist many variables in the investment environment, such as the unstable investment legislation, the huge gap between legislation and enforcement and various political risks. On the other hand, with the increase of the investment and the expansion of fields, the dispute among different parties will surely increase. In this case, it is natural for us to think deeply: how we can effectively solve the investment dispute between foreign investors and the host countries of Africa so as to provide institutional guarantee for the better development of the investment in Africa.At present, the research on the dispute resolution of international investment is very active and the results are also very abundant. However, when this project comes to the background of Africa, its research is still very weak——We mainly focus on the more mature areas like European Union, North America, East Asia, while Africa has become the blind spot of our vision. The main content of the thesis is about the investment dispute resolution in Africa and it can be divided into the following four parts:Part one: The analysis of African integration and Sub-regional integration so as to analyze the influence of investment in Africa, point out the main ricks and conduct probability analysis of investment dispute.Part two: This part is focus on the existing investment dispute resolution. Base on the research results in part one, proceeding from the existing investment dispute resolution and regarding the main way of dispute resolution.Part three: This part points out the challenges the ICSID mechanism is faced with. And then mainly discusses the contribution of OHADA to investment dispute resolution. What's more, this part tries to make a comparison between the arbitration mechanism of the OHADA and that of ICSID.Part four: The perfection of the investment dispute settlement mechanism of Chinese enterprise towards Africa. Based on the discussion mentioned above, this part points out the position and principle Chinese investors hold in investment dispute resolution towards Africa, and then puts forward some suggestions to improve certain dispute resolution.