A Study Of Environmental Clauses In Bilateral Investment Treaty

In these years,as the economy develops and the process of globalization intensifies,international capital flows have become more frequent.Nations have formulated bilateral investment agreements(BITs)to advance investment.The main purpose of early bilateral investment treaties was to promote investment liberalization,with less mention of environmental issues.In order to balance their economic and environmental interests,capital-exporting countries often transfer their highly polluting industries to capital-importing countries,and capital-importing countries introduce heavy polluting enterprises to reduce economic standards for economic development.While investment liberalization promotes the economic development of the host country,it also brings a host of serious environmental problems to the host country.Such as the Indian Bhopal gas leak in 1984,the Gulf of Mexico crude oil spill in 2010,and the Bohai Bay oil spill in 2011.However,we live on the same planet,and environmental issues have never been a national issue,but a global issue.Transferring pollution to less developed countries will not solve the problem of environmental pollution.These major environmental disasters have caused people to think about how to solve the conflict between investment and the environment.The use of bilateral investment treaties to resolve conflicts between investment and the environment has become a hot issue in the field of international investment law.In addition to the introduction,this article studies the environmental protection clauses in bilateral investment treaties in four parts.The first part introduces the overview of environmental protection clauses from three aspects,including the definition of environmental protection clauses in bilateral investment agreements,the positioning of promoting environmental protection clauses to promote sustainable investment,and the values of incorporating environmental protection clauses into BITs.There is a general understanding of the terms of protection.The second part introduces the structure and content of the environmental protection clauses in the existing BITs,and reviews the environmental protection clauses on the basis of analyzing the structure of the environmental protection clauses.The third part introduces the case of international investment arbitration in which the two host countries also invoke environmental protection clauses with different results,and analyzes the reasons for the differences and the conflicts with the investment protection clauses in the application of environmental protection clauses.The fourth part analyzes the status quo of the environmental protection clauses of China’s conclusion of bilateral investment agreements,and puts forward the author’s suggestions on China’s conclusion and amendment of bilateral investment agreements in the future.China should attach importance to environmental protection clauses in ideology,improve existing bilateral investment agreement models in action,and actively use the latest models in negotiations to promote the replacement of old bilateral investment agreements.