Mr. Colin Brown:

I will respond as, Mr. Schlegelmilch said, to the question on the multilateral investment court. The ideas enveloping the court are threefold. First, the ICS provided for in CETA is also included within the EU’s agreements with Vietnam, Singapore and Mexico. We are negotiating it with Chile and Indonesia. Discussions with China are currently on hold. Because the system involves full-time judges, it makes more sense than having these bilaterally and at certain moment in time moving them to a multilateral body that can administer these disputes. The second reason, at EU level, is that there is strong interest from member states to upgrade their existing bilateral investment treaties. As Mr. Schlegelmich mentioned in his opening statement, there are 3,000 of them internationally. Member states, but not Ireland, are party to 1,400 of them. The multilateral investment court could apply to those 1,400 treaties. It would be important in modernising and reforming them, and in making sure that these concerns that we are discussing today are not held.

Related to that, there are a number of countries worldwide that are interested in the idea of this reform. They would apply it through their own treaties. This will not happen overnight. We are looking at a mechanism that could potentially reform all 3,000 of the existing ISDS agreements. CETA is important in this context because it was the first agreement that made reference to this idea. It has transitional clauses that would allow a move to the multilateral investment court. Eventually ratifying it, as the European Commission hopes Ireland will eventually do, is a positive signal that this is the direction of the reform. It will provide further support to the reform movement. The reform, as Mr. Schlegelmich mentioned, is taking place in UNCITRAL. Therefore, a UN body is working on that. More than 100 countries take part in it. Our hope is that over the next two or three years we get to the point where those negotiations are sufficiently completed to create the multilateral investment court. It would apply CETA, but ultimately these 3,000 agreements. It is important to keep in mind that in international negotiations one needs to keep up a certain level of momentum. Ratifying CETA in time is an important part of keeping that momentum going.