Latin & South America

Call for Papers Call for Submission - Trade, Law, and Development: The Board of Editors of Trade, Law and Development is pleased to invite original, unpublished manuscripts for publication in the Special Issue of the Journal (Vol. XIV, No. 1) in the form of ‘Articles’, ‘Notes’, ‘Comments’ and ‘Book Reviews’, focusing on the theme “Looking Ahead: Addressing the Challenges Faced by the International Trade Regime”. Manuscripts...

[Moisés Montiel Mogollón is a lawyer advising individuals, companies, and States on matters of international law, human rights, and other international areas at Lotus Soluciones Legales. He teaches Treaty Law and LOAC at Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City) and Universidad Panamericana (Guadalajara).] As lawyers and advocates, we are trained since school to frame our arguments in a persuasive manner by using legal reasoning....

Events CONFERENCE: Corporate Human Rights Due Diligence and Systemic Inequalities 25-26 October 2021: The British Institute of International and Comparative Law and the University of Copenhagen are pleased to announce that registration is now open for an international online conference on 'Corporate Human Rights Due Diligence and Systemic Inequalities' 25-26 October 2021. Co-organisers Lise Smit (BIICL) and Sorcha MacLeod (UCPH) are bringing...

[Tun Khin is President of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK and Tomás Ojea Quintana is a former UN Special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar.] On 18 August, in a court in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina, six women made history in the Rohingyas’ long struggle for justice. For the first time anywhere in the world, Rohingya victims of...

Alicia Nicholls Caribbean small island developing States (SIDS) joined with other United Nations (UN) members to sign on to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. These 17 goals and their 169 targets form the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, agreed in 2015, covering areas as diverse as no poverty, zero hunger, gender equality, climate action, peace justice and strong...

Gerardo Centeno García Mexico’s 2013 Reforma Energetica (Energy Reform, RE) was a constitutional reform that allowed the participation of private companies (national or foreign) in the Mexican Energy Sector (MES), previously reserved solely for State-owned enterprises (SOEs). This constitutional reform modified articles 25, 27, and 28 of the Mexican Constitution (CPEUM), entering into force on December 20, 2013. To help the...

Antonius R. Hippolyte & Jason K. Haynes  Most developing countries still lack the industrial capacity to participate in international trade in a manner similar to industrialised countries, whose industrial transformation was catalysed at the end of the 18th century. Thus, advocates of the neoliberal international economic order have long touted Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as the panacea for development and economic...

Ximena Sierra-Camargo In Colombia in the 1990s, a mining boom led to a significant increase in the extractive industries, including large-scale gold mining. This boom was provoked by legal and institutional reform of the framework of the Colombian constitutional State, and following the guidelines of transnational actors like the World Bank, who sought to standardise mining regulation across Latin America. The new...

Jodi-Ann Stephenson The socio-political context of colonialism and imperialism, within which the rules on foreign investment protection originated, has had an enduring effect on the evolution of foreign direct investment (‘FDI’) and its protection. Despite the formal ending of colonialism, the imperial space within which the rules of foreign investment protection originated has profoundly impacted the character and development of modern...

Nicolás M. Perrone & Leonardo E. Stanley The 1990s witnessed a surge in economic and legal reforms that prioritised markets over government in allocating economic resources, installing a new institutional ruling. For neoliberals, open economies and free markets forces would bring laggards towards convergence. Rational agents' investment decisions might place countries into a stable, long-run growth path. In the field of...

Mohsen al Attar and Rafael Quintero Godinez Investment is a heavy word. It stumbles rather than rolls off the tongue, perhaps because the speaker is aware of its convoluted character. It invokes images of factories, infrastructure, workers, money, and men (in suits or in hard hats, usually both). Most of all, investment conveys an evolutionary trajectory; one that is ideological and...

Rocío Quintero, Timothy Fish Hodgson and Young Park work at the International Commission of Jurists. This symposium consists of a series of posts authored by the different panelists of a webinar hosted by the International Commission of Jurists titled “COVID-19 and Courts: A Global Trend of Judicial Deference?“ On 11 May 2021, the Administrative Tribunal of Cundinamarca in Colombia ordered  the Colombian Government to...