This article describes without taking any position the new
transparency standards in investor-state dispute settlement of the United
Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), consisting of the
UNCITRAL Rules on Transparency in Treaty-based Investor-State Arbitration
(effective date: 1 April 2014), the United Nations Convention on Transparency
in Treaty-based Investor-State Arbitration (New York, 2014 – the ‘Mauritius
Convention on Transparency’) and the Transparency Registry, which is the
repository for the publication of information and documents in treaty-based
investor-state arbitration and is – thanks to donor funding of the European
Union and of OFID (the OPEC Fund for International Development) – now fully
operational. The text proposes the wide promotion of the UNCITRAL Transparency
Standards since they are beneficial to the system of investment arbitration as
such.