The International Seabed Authority (ISA), created under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), regulates mineral resources in the Area beyond national jurisdiction. As interest in deep-seabed mining grows and negotiations on the Mining Code progress, the legal character of ISA contracts warrants closer scrutiny. This article compares ISA contracts with traditional investment mining agreements, assessing their structures, rights and obligations, and dispute settlement mechanisms. Although the ISA's role cannot be equated with that of a sovereign host State, the analysis reveals significant functional parallels between the two regimes. It argues that examining them together enables mutual cross-fertilization: investment-contract practice can inform the development of the ISA's exploitation regime, while the ISA's public trusteeship model offers valuable lessons for embedding environmental and intergenerational considerations into mining contracts on land and at sea.
Mediation is getting renewed attention as an alternative means of resolving international investment disputes. A critical question in accommodating mediation within investment disputes is how to ensure the enforcement of a settlement agreement resulting from the mediation. In this respect, the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation (New York, 2018) (the ``Singapore Convention'' or the ``Convention'') offers a meaningful benchmark for designing mediation and the enforcement of mediated outcomes in investment disputes. Notably, the Convention adopts a 'parallelism structure' in which the enforcement obligation is juxtaposed against grounds for refusal of enforcement. The parallelism approach in the Singapore Convention, with various refusal grounds stemming from the conduct of mediation, stands to invite easy challenges to prospective enforcement. The concern becomes acute given the inherent and embedded flexibility in mediation. The structural tension arising from the 'enforcement-refusal' parallelism design in the Singapore Convention offers an important lesson in designing enforcement mechanisms for mediated outcomes in investment disputes. In particular, the fine line between flexibility and due process should be clarified and elaborated in instruments covering future investment dispute mediation.
