The contested legitimacy of investment arbitration and the human rights ordeal.

Summary Introduction: This chapter proceeds from the conviction that the language of human rights - understood here as encompassing collective social and economic needs - is the most disruptive common vocabulary that can be mobilized today, with normative leverage, in order to address at least some of the negative distributional consequences of the current international investment regime. Among these, the most prominent is the imbalance between the advantages accruing to the investor and the lack of correlative obligations or duties on its part toward the host State, whose hands are tied contractually, moreover, on many issues of public regulation. At the same time, the conduct of corporate investors abroad, encouraged and facilitated by the same investment treaties, has not hitherto been subject to any significant degree of regulation in their "home State". [First lines].