In light of the ongoing debate about the fairness of investor state arbitration (see my earlier blog post here), the European Commission has now proposed a new investor state court to replace the arbitrations under ICSID and UNCITRAL.  (See the whole article here.) The court would operate apparently like the WTO with both a lower court and appellate body.  No word yet on whether this system would also include mediation as Nancy Welsh and I (and others) have argued.   The article argues that this is a clear defeat for arbitration lawyers who believe the current system works well.  On the other hand, the EU trade commissioner when announcing this system stated, “the old, traditional form of dispute resolution suffers from a  fundamental lack of trust.”  All very interesting.   Thanks to Nancy for sending this along!