Constitutionality of local tobacco regulation: An analysis of the case of Philippine Tobacco Institute vs city of Balanga

Objectives: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) region has complementary advantages in energy and resources and closely related interests in geopolitical energy security. Common interests and close cooperation led to the creation of energy cooperation arrangements among the SCO countries. Particularly, owing to the outbreak of COVID-19 epidemic, the states progressively incline to focus more on issues concerning tobacco control to promote sustainable environmental development. The establishment and improvement of the SCO energy club mechanism is an important way of SCO energy cooperation. This paper adopts the method of combining history with normative analysis, by analyzing the current of the SCO Energy Club running mechanism, proposes that the position and development target of the SCO Energy Club should be clear, the coordination of multilateral and bilateral and unilateral measures of energy function remains to be further play, contribution to the energy trade and investment disputes should be timely strengthen, then the SCO Energy Club could play a positive role in promoting the implementation of cross-border energy cooperation measures within the region. The paper proposes to use legal mechanism to construct SCO Energy Club so as to make it play the role of security guarantee mechanism more fully.

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Venus, Mars, and Brussels: Legitimacy and Dispute Settlement Culture in Investment Law and WTO Law: A Response to Joost Pauwelyn

AJIL Unbound ◽

10.1017/s2398772300001641 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 109 ◽

pp. 309-315

Author(s):

Robert Howse

Keyword(s):

Dispute Settlement ◽

Health And Safety ◽

The United States ◽

The European Union ◽

Policy Space ◽

Transatlantic Trade ◽

Philip Morris ◽

Tobacco Regulation ◽

Investor Protections ◽

Trade And Investment

Late last year, the European Commission unveiled an ambitious and complex proposal to replace investor-state arbitration with a transnational court, including an appellate instance, which has now been incorporated into its new bilateral agreements with Vietnam and Canada (CETA). The Commission was responding to strong public resistance to including investor protections in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the trade and investment agreement being negotiated between the European Union and the United States. This resistance reflects a remarkable shift in emphasis from the World Trade Organization (WTO) to the investment regime in what could be called loosely the antineoliberal globalization movement. The overarching concern is that international decision-makers with a neoliberal or procorporate bias will limit the policy space of sovereign states, especially in sensitive areas such as public services, the environment, health, and safety. While it is arguable that few of the actual outcomes in investor-state disputes can properly be understood in this way, the pursuit by Philip Morris of its attack on tobacco regulation through the investment regime has certainly provided a very obvious example for the activists. (The defeat of that challenge on jurisdictional grounds doesn’t really provide assurance about the substantive norms at issue and their consistency with policy space.)

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