La incorporación de derechos humanos en el Sistema Internacional de Solución de Conflictos Inversionista-Estado

Mexico has an extensive network of international investment agreements (IIAs), including more than thirty bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and about fifteen agreements with investment provisions. These treaties establish states’ primary obligations to foreign investors and commonly provide investor–state arbitration under the ICSID Convention, the ICSID Additional Facility Rules, or the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules. ICSID is the central institution in investor–state dispute settlement and its Convention the most used arbitration rule set; Mexico acceded to the ICSID Convention on August 26, 2018, a move that signaled greater legal certainty to foreign investors amid NAFTA renegotiations. NAFTA has been significant in the development of the field—it underpins 4% of all cases registered under the ICSID Convention and Additional Facility Rules, and 34 of the 50 ICSID cases involving Mexico relied on NAFTA provisions—enabling investors to bypass domestic courts in favor of international forums. Investment disputes increasingly implicate human rights and environmental protection (notably in Tecmed and Metalclad), and recent claims such as Legacy Vulcan (filed January 3, 2019) against Mexico underscore potential community and health impacts. This article examines arbitral practice and the growing incorporation of human rights references into IIAs—in preambles, in limits on fair and equitable treatment and indirect expropriation, and in emerging obligations for investors—to assess how human rights considerations are being integrated into the investor–state dispute settlement system.