The legal protection of foreign investors is mainly ensured by international investment agreements, with more than two thousand bilateral investment treaties worldwide and nearly four hundred other international treaties containing investment protection provisions. These conventions provide legal solutions for foreign investors to reduce investment risks in a foreign country, including rules on the treatment of foreign investment, expropriation and dispute settlement.

One of the most common ways of resolving disputes between a foreign investor and the host state is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) procedure, which is conducted before an independent international arbitration tribunal. ISDS generally has the advantage of being objective and efficient, but it has also been criticised for legal certainty, transparency, procedural inconsistency, costs and the impartiality of the arbitrators.

This paper examines the ISDS system and the rules of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), one of the most common procedural fora. It focuses on concerns about the independence of arbitrators, one of the most critical aspects of the system.