The impending British exit (Brexit) from the European Union has placed the UK’s investment policy at a crossroads. A post-Brexit UK will now have to reorganise its investment relationships with its economic partners through bespoke UK IIAs. This exercise will have to accommodate the shifting zeitgeist concerning the balance of investors’ rights and the right to regulate IIAs that is expected. This paper examines the continued relevance of the recently minted Investment Protection Chapter in the EU-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, acknowledged by Britain’s power brokers, as a persuasive model for the UK to emulate for this purpose. This is notwithstanding the uncertainties that now surround the implementation and efficacy of the Agreement in light of Brexit and a pending decision from the Court of Justice of the European Union. Such emulation would ultimately make for a better Investor-State Dispute Settlement System in the UK IIAs by providing a much needed update to its old investment treaty architecture.

This paper examines the new trends of interaction between the legal transformations in China and the international investment treaties, focusing on the legal reforms after the Fourth Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Party Central Committee Fourth Plenary Session of the 18th Party Central Committee of the PRC of 2014 (2014 FPS). It envisages that the 2014 FPS will impose significant influence on the current legal system in China, on the forthcoming Foreign Investment Law of China, and eventually on the negotiation and application of the international investment treaties concluded by China because the CPC Central Committee Decision on Certain significant Issues regarding the Comprehensive Promotion of Law (PCC Decision) has demonstrated the directions of legal constructions and reforms explicitly and comprehensively from the administrative, judicial, social, and jurist perspectives, which constitutes the most inclusive PCC Decision regarding Chinese law and justice.