Introduction

A Working Group prepared this Note (1) to estimate the costs of establishing and operating an Advisory Centre on International Investment Law ("ACIIL" or "Centre") that provides assistance to States in handling treaty-based investor-State disputes; and (2) to identify possible sources of finance for the Centre's operation.

It does not deal with the desirability of establishing an ACIIL and the range of other issues to be considered in this respect.

Since the specific objectives, beneficiaries and scope of services of the ACIIL are not known at this point, certain assumptions have been made to arrive at rough estimates. Naturally, these estimates can be--and need to be--adjusted in light of further discussions by States. Moreover, since the number of disputes varies across years (and it is not known how many of them would be brought to the Centre), the approach taken here does not start with the question of how many staff a Centre would need to handle treaty-based investment disputes involving potential beneficiaries that arose, for example, during the past three years; rather, the approach taken in this Note is to assume that the Centre has a certain number of staff and it then estimates how many cases that staff can handle.