Passport, S'il Vous Plait? Investment Treaty Protection and the Individual Investor's Citizenship‪.‬

When contemplating the protections afforded to private investors by Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) or Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs)--and the concomitant right to pursue investor-state arbitration before bodies such as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)--we usually think of rights and claims held by corporate investors. The recent flurry of ICSID jurisprudence and literature on the topic of corporate nationality, (1) however, has overshadowed another powerful source of BIT/FTA protection, namely, rights held by individual investors. This article will focus on the evolution of ICSID and other international jurisprudence concerning an individual investor's ability to bring investor-state claims. It will reveal the evolution of a relatively coherent and predictable framework for determining whether a natural person is entitled to protection under applicable BITs, FTAs, or other sources of international economic law.