Introduction

Since the end of the 1990s, international arbitration has become one of the main mechanisms for the settlement of disputes between foreign investors and host States. This phenomenon seems to be directly linked to the proliferation, in the same period, of international treaties entered into by States for the protection and promotion of foreign investments, most of them bilateral investment treaties, but also bilateral and regional free trade agreements containing investment protection rules, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement - NAFTA, and sectorial multilateral investment ...