TWO-DAY CONFERENCE ON “REGULATORY EXPROPRIATIONS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW” TO BE HELD AT NYU LAW – APRIL 26 & 27

joan.dim@nyu.edu

Conference on “Regulatory Expropriations in International Law.”

As highlighted by several recent press reports, as well as a PBS Special on “Trading Democracy”, several recent awards by international arbitration tribunals established under the dispute settlement system of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have addressed claims by foreign investors that their investments were “expropriated” by environmental and land use regulations that limited their ability to do business. In one case, Metalclad v. The United Mexican States, the Arbitral Tribunal ruled that Mexico was liable for $16.7 million after local authorities denied a building permit to a U.S. corporation that had built a hazardous waste facility in reliance on assurances from the Mexican federal government that local approval would not be a problem. The award was recently upheld in part and overturned in part by the Supreme Court of British Columbia.

Such awards have attracted considerable attention from those concerned about the balance bilateral investment treaties and multilateral agreements such as NAFTA have struck between the property rights of foreign investors and collective or community rights relating to social objectives such as environmental protection. The issue of how much protection to afford the property rights of foreign investors also has become central to debates over the proposed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas.

The Center on Environmental and Land Use Law at New York University School of Law and the NYU Environmental Law Journal are sponsoring the first major conference to address these crucial issues.

Panels will include: an overview of recent arbitral awards in regulatory expropriation challenges to environmental and land use regulations; a debate about whether international law should recognize regulatory expropriations and, if so, how expropriation should be defined; and a discussion of the controversy over how to measure compensation when expropriations occur.

The symposium also will feature a discussion about domestic legal challenges that might be brought if multilateral investment treaties such as NAFTA are interpreted to expand the compensation requirement for regulatory expropriations beyond signatory states' domestic laws.

Participants include:

--Lawyers who represented the claimants and the governments in Metalclad and other NAFTA disputes (Barry Appleton, Appleton & Associates International Lawyers, negotiators who framed the language of NAFTA and Hugo Perezcano, General Counsel for International Trade Negotiations, Secretariat of the Economy, Mexico)

--Those who negotiated the investor protection provisions of NAFTA (Daniel Price, now Chair, International Practice Group, Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy LLP);

--Officials from the relevant government agencies of the United States, Canada, and Mexico ( including Ambassador Alberto Szekely, Special Advisor on International Law to the Secretary of Foreign Relations; Meg Kinnear, General Counsel, Trade Law Division, Canada Departments of Justice and of Foreign Affairs and International Trade; Barton Legum, Office of the Legal Adviser, U.S. Department of State; and Ethan Shenkman, Attorney Advisor, Policy, Legislation and Special Litigation Section, Environment and Natural Resources Division, U.S. Department of Justice);

--Experts on other expropriation provisions (including Rainer Geiger, Deputy Director, Financial, Fiscal and Enterprise Affairs, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development );

--Representatives of public interest groups involved in trade issues (including Lori M. Wallach, Director, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch)

--Scholars of expropriation law and of international law (including NYU Law Professors Vicki Been, David Golove, Benedict Kingsbury, Mattias Kumm, and NYU Global Law Professor Phillipe Sands; Professor Francisco Orrego Vicuna, Law School and Institute for International Studies, University of Chile and President of the World Bank Administrative Tribunal; Prof. Rudolf Dolzer, Director, Institute for International Law, University of Bonn; and Professor Thomas W. Merrill, John Paul Stevens Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law)

When: Friday, April 26, 8:30 AM – 5:30 PM Saturday, April 27, 8:30 AM – 1:30 PM

Where: NYU School of Law, Vanderbilt Hall, Greenberg Lounge, 40 Washington Square South.

RVSP: For more information or a press reservation, please contact Joan M. Dim, 212.998.6849 or joan.dim@nyu.edu

04/23/02