Abstract

Recent events concerning EU negotiations with Canada and the United States for the conclusion of the CETA and TTIP agreements have brought to the attention of many jurists the workings of the Investor-State dispute settlement in international agreements on trade and investment. The aim of this work is to identify the problematic constitutional profiles of the ISDS system with reference to the principles of equality, the separation of state powers and the judicial protection of rights, through the analysis of some significant cases. In the second part, there is a detailed analysis of the Commission's new proposal, drawn up during the negotiations for TTIP and already inserted into the CETA agreement (the so-called ICS), in order to show how its critical points, dangerous for democratic systems, remain unaltered in the new ICS mechanism.