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With the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty on 1. December 2009, the individual EU Member States have transferred the competence to negotiate international agreements on Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) to the EU. With its Communication and Regulation, the European Commission has initiated the discussion on the future European Investment Policy. The AK welcomes this initiative. It provides the opportunity to reconsider the policies of individual Member States in the spirit of the Lisbon Treaty and to reconcile the future European Investment Policy with the comprehensive goals of the Union in order to ensure policy coherence.

The key issue of the European Investment Policy is the continuation and development respectively of the existing Bilateral Investment Protection Agreements (BITs) of the Member States. They provide the investors of the individual Member States in the host country with a legally binding level of protection, which - as the experiences of the last decade have shown - were frequently at the expense of both public interest and the population.<br /><br />The AK thinks that the current BITs of the EU Member States are both inappropriate and unbalanced. The agreements are exclusively orientated towards the economic interests of transnational enterprises. The AK has not only repeatedly criticised this fact in positions on the Austrian BITs sample text, but also in the AK position on „EU Future Trade Policy“. That is why the existing BITs cannot be used as blueprints for the future approach of the EU in international investment agreements.

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Elisabeth Beer

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