They have to accept it, because becoming members of these international conventions is a sign that you are part of the club. You are joining the global economy. If you want the benefits, you have to accept the disciplines. It is on three counts that I want to highlight them. The first is traditional expropriation.
Somebody has property, and the government grabs it.
It is is now replaced by the much more opaque principle of regulatory taking that has emerged in the United States, where you look at the regulation and its effect on the functioning of commercial property rather than the formal taking-away. It now means virtually any right with a financial value. So the regulatory-taking discussion emerging from U.S. law and from the European Convention on Human Rights is now entering into international economic law. The second issue is the principle of discrimination, which has led hitherto led a very quiet existence in international law, but an important one in trade law. In trade, it is products which compete, whilst in investment, it is investors or businesses which are competing and where discrimination, typically by capturing the regulatory machinery, has played a role.