On Transparency Rules Of International Investment Arbitration

For a long time, international investment arbitration obedience to secret principle of international commercial arbitration, however, this practice suffers criticisms from most scholars. The reason is that in international investment arbitration, especially investment arbitration based on investor-state treaty, the secret principle will damage public interest of host country and lead to legitimacy crisis of international investment arbitration easily. In order to resolve this crisis, transparency is advocated in international investment area recent years. The premise of the implementation of the court is openness, including arbitration process. Since NAFTA brought into transparency into practices firstly, ICSID and UNCITRAL also start transparency reform in succession. Along with the developed countries advocating, transparency reform begin from all over the world. Transparency rules are a new breach in international investment arbitration. There are also some questions of transparency which we should pay much attention. According to UNCTAD’s 2014 world investment report, China plays a decisive role in world investment. However, China’s attitude to transparency is vague. So it is an important problem to China that making transparency rules link up with domestic law.This article uses comparison and analysis and combines with cases to study transparency rules. It is divided into four parts. The first part introduces transparency rules briefly, containing meaning, origin and effect of transparency rules. The second part analysis transparency rules in international investment tribunals with representative cases, also analysis problems in transparency rules. The third part depicts transparency rules in regional investment agreement, analysis member states’ attitude to transparency rules and compares the common and differences of transparency rules. The last part will analysis the problems of transparency rules, investment’s development status and problems of China and gives some suggestions to China.