The Investment Protection Rules of the EU-Canada Trade Agreement : Emulating the Rule of Law or Still Granting Supersized Protection to Investors? A Case Study on Industrial Mining in Finland

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Brill Nijhoff. All rights reserved.This article provides an in-depth analysis of the substantive protection provided to investors against indirect expropriations under the EU-Canada Free Trade Agreement (ceta) and under the Constitution of Finland. More specifically, we analyse these respective spheres of protection in a regulatory context in Finland where Canadian investors operate actively: industrial mining. The purpose of the comparative analysis is to provide tentative answers to three broad research questions: Can investors challenge legitimate public interest measures under ceta's investment protection rules? Is the protection provided under ceta co-extensive with the protection provided under the constitutions of countries placing high on global rule of law rankings? And are countries upholding the rule of law safe from investor claims under ceta's reformed investment protection rules? A more general purpose is to bring more depth and nuance into the debates concerning the reform of the investment treaty regime, which often travel at a high level of abstraction. c koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021.Peer reviewe

Ulkomaisten sijoittajien vastuu kansainvälisen oikeuden näkökulmasta : Jean Ho & Mavluda Sattorova (toim.) Investors' International Law. Studies in international trade and investment law 24. Bloomsbury 2021. 450 s.

Non peer reviewe

The concept of exploitation in international human trafficking law

Human trafficking is commonly known as a criminal practice that takes place in the framework of sex trade: women and children are trafficked within a state, or from one state to another, for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Similarly, the early 20th century international conventions aimed to tackle ‘white slave traffic’, trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation. However, it is misleading to see trafficking only within this context. People are trafficked so that they can be exploited in sweatshops, for agricultural labour, domestic labour, forced marriage, begging, or for harvesting their organs. Exploitation, thus, can take place in any socio-economic sector where labour or services are expected from people, and national and international laws have adopted various approaches to tackle these issues. This thesis investigates the foundations of the legal concept of exploitation, as it is currently understood to be a part of international human trafficking law. It is interested in explaining how the concept of exploitation has changed over time to serve different purposes. As a central element of the trafficking definition, the concept of exploitation has caused a lot of debate among legal theorists and practitioners. This debate demonstrates that there in fact does not exist one single definition of exploitation, but multiple understandings derived from different histories and contexts. The concept has encompassed different exploitative practices at different times and changed its meaning to fit various purposes at a given time, therefore reflecting and supporting a range of positions and interpretations of politicians, legal practitioners or the judiciary. The concept’s ambiguity and categorical nature relates to the pragmatic benefits of flexibility in a political arena where competing perspectives must be negotiated to find a global consensus. Also, the content of the concept of exploitation is not independent of the real-world exploitative practices and because these practices change, the concept needs to carry a certain level of ambiguity to be able to take into consideration various circumstances. This thesis uses descriptive conceptual analysis and conceptual history to trace down the categories that fall under the concept of exploitation, and secondly, to locate the social and historical factors and contexts that produced a certain meaning for the concept. The categories within the concept of exploitation currently encompass ‘exploitation of others for prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation’, ‘forced labour or services’, ‘slavery or practices similar to slavery’, ‘servitude’, and ‘removal or organs’. This list was brought forward by the Trafficking Protocol in 2000, and as I argue, marks the point at which the concept of exploitation was fully conceptualised and became a legal-historical meta-concept. In the European context, the EU Directive 2011/36/EU has further expanded the categories that fall under the concept of exploitation, with those of ‘forced begging’ and the ‘exploitation of criminal activities’, and thus is a more recent attempt to respond to contemporary problems. In the last part of this thesis, I examine the benefits of descriptive conceptual analysis