On the Changing Structure of International Investment Law: The Human Right to Water and ICSID Arbitration

Water is the world's third largest industry after oil and energy power. Although clean drinking water and sanitation are necessary for the health and development of individuals and communities, even today, billions of people lack access to either. In response to these concerns, the international community has set a Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of providing, by 2015, clean water and improved sanitation to at least half of the people worldwide who now lack these services. Water is treated both as a public good and an economic good. In the last decade, we have witnessed the commoditisation through privatization and liberalisation of an essential good for each individual's life. Transnational corporations may encounter water issues in at least three different contexts: a) as enablers of access to water; b) as providers or distributors of water and c) as a user or consumer of water. Many initiatives have been developed within the United Nations such as the Global Compact and the appointment of both an independent expert on human rights obligations related to access to safe drinking water and sanitation and a Special Representative of the Secretary General on business and human rights. Both of them are mainstreaming human rights in the business sector reconciling different forms of regulations. The right to water has come into discussion in a number of ICSID arbitrations and other cases are still pending. The purpose of this article is to discuss the advancement of the thinking in this field so that it could be applied in arbitration practice

Choice-of-Law in Third Millennium Arbitrations: The Relevance Of The Unidroit Principles Of International Commercial Contracts

Since their official presentation in May 1994, the UNIDROIT Principles on international commercial contracts have received various applications, either in the framework of institutional arbitration, or in the context of ad hoc arbitration. Arbitrators employ different methods in order to determine the “rules of law” applicable to the merits of the dispute. The present analysis aims to build up some models of application of transnational rules such as the UNIDROIT Principles, on the basis of patterns observed in arbitral jurisprudence. This will help to understand the use of the Unidroit principles in present-day international commercial arbitration and attempts to assess whether, and to what extent, their provisions may be seen as a contibution to contemporary private international law

Decline in hospitalization rates for herpes zoster in Italy (2003–2018): reduction in the burden of disease or changing of hospitalization criteria?

Background: Herpes Zoster (HZ) is a very demanding disease caused by the reactivation of latent Varicella Zoster Virus. The main aim of this study was to estimate the burden of the HZ hospitalizations in Italy from 2003 to 2018 evaluating temporal trends. Methods: Retrospective population-based study analyzing Hospital Discharge Records. Hospitalization records reporting the ICD-9 CM 053.X code in the principal diagnosis or in any of the five secondary diagnoses were considered as cases. Trends of hospitalization rates have been evaluated by Joinpoint analyses. Results: Overall, 99,036 patients were hospitalized with HZ in the 16-year period of the study, and 83,720 (84.5%) of these patients were over 50 years. Hospitalization rate was 10.4 per 100,000 persons/year with a significant decreasing trend from 13.9 in 2003–2006 to 7.8 in 2015–2018 (p < 0.001). Hospitalization rates showed a 20-fold higher risk among subjects aged over 80 years and 11-fold higher risk among 70–79-year-old subjects with respect to those aged less than 50 years. Over time, a statistically significant increase was observed for the case fatality rate (from 1.2 to 1.7%; p < 0.001) and the median length of stay (from 7 to 8 days; p < 0.001). Conclusions: Zoster is a disease that causes hospitalization as relatively frequent complication and the observed reduced trend over time could be due to a restriction in hospitalization criteria instead of a reduced burden of disease. The decreasing trend should be carefully interpreted, since it could have an impact on promoting herpes zoster vaccination

A tool for declarative Trace Alignment via automated planning

We present a tool, called TraceAligner, for solving Trace Alignment by first compiling into Planning and then solving it with any available cost-optimal planner. TraceAligner can produce different variants of the output Planning instance, each offering different degrees of readability and solution efficiency. The Planning instance is expressed in PDDL, the Planning Domain Definition Language. The tool can be easily extended and coupled with any planner taking PDDL as input language. A thorough experimental analysis has shown that the approach dramatically outperforms existing ad-hoc tools, thus making TraceAligner the best-performing tool for Trace Alignment with declarative specifications

"Efficient Breach" and Economic Analysis of International Investment Law

The field of economic analysis of law may be traced to works of Bentham and even the Italian Beccaria , but finds its current structure with seminal works by Coase , Becker , Calabresi , Posner and, more recently, Cooter & Ulen and Shavell.The law&economics revolution has, so far, very rarely touched international law (and, a fortiori, international investment law), perhaps because analysis has focused only on the domestic (and mainly US) context or maybe because of a lack of knowledge of technical international legal mechanisms by his founding fathers. The authors argue that the concept of "efficient breach" is not adequate for an international investment law context

Is open source software the New Lex Mercatoria?

The first generation of academic scholarship on the Internet proclaimed that its transnational nature rendered it inherently unregulable by conventional governments. Instead, the Internet would be governed by rules and customs developed by members of the online community itself. Although most of these early Internet theorists remained somewhat vague about the mechanism through which such norms and structures might arise, some suggested that they might emerge through international standard setting organizations or the system for resolving domain name disputes. As a model for how such system might emerge, they pointed to the lex mercatoria, which is generally characterized as a set of uniform legal principles developed during medieval times on behalf of traveling merchants that was based on the customs and practices of international trade, enforced by special merchant courts, and independent of local governments and their laws. Other scholars expressed skepticism about the Internet’s supposed unregulability. Indeed, such claims would ultimately be contradicted by events such as the United States’ unilateral efforts to block the creation of the .xxx domain on the Internet, the influence of governments and large corporations over international standard setting organizations, as well as China’s success in restricting the online activity of its citizens. These failures have done little to dampen the desire for a conceptual foundation for Internet self-governance. Interestingly, Internet guru Lawrence Lessig has suggested that more widespread use of open source software may increase the Internet’s ability to resist governmental control. This Article explores potential implications of that observation by examining whether more widespread use of open source software might provide the basis for the type of bottom-up ordering associated with the lex mercatoria. Part I offers an overview of open source software. Part II describes both the ancient and modern versions of the lex mercatoria and outlines some of the central debates about those institutions. Part III examines whether open source software can provide a decentralized mechanism for unifying the online commercial environment that is independent of national governments and international organizations in the manner that the proponents of the lex mercatoria envision. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a system of self-governance based on open source runs afoul of the same questions of spontaneity, universality, and autonomy that surround the lex mercatoria. Other scholars expressed skepticism about the Internet’s supposed unregulability. Indeed, such claims would ultimately be contradicted by events such as the United States’ unilateral efforts to block the creation

Evaluation of the burden of HPV-related hospitalizations as a useful tool to increase awareness: 2007–2017 data from the sicilian hospital discharge records

In light of the implementation of human papillomavirus (HPV) prevention strategies, epidemiological studies in different geographical areas are required in order to assess the impact of HPV-related diseases. The purpose of the present study was to describe the burden of HPV-related hospitalizations in Sicily. A retrospective observational study estimated 43,531 hospitalizations attributable to HPV from 2007 to 2017. During the observed period, there was a decrease for all HPV-related conditions with a higher reduction, among neoplasms, for cervical cancer (annual percent change (APC) = −9.9%, p < 0.001). The median age for cervical cancer was 45 years old, with an increasing value from 43 to 47 years (p < 0.001). The age classes with greater decreases in hospital admissions for invasive cancers were women aged 35 years or more (APC range from −5.5 to −9.86) and 25–34 years old (APC = −11.87, p < 0.001) for women with cervical carcinoma in situ. After ten years for vaccine introduction and sixteen years for cervical cancer screening availability, a relatively large decrease in hospital admissions for cervical cancer and other HPV-related diseases in Sicily was observed. Some clinical characteristics of hospitalization, such as increasing age, are suggestive clues for the impact of preventive strategies, but further research is needed to confirm this relationship