Emerging trends in the dispute settlement mechanism in the Free Trade Agreements of China, South Korea and Japan

Over a period of time, Asian countries started negotiating their FTAs in more sophisticated ways, as compared to their earlier approach of negotiating on the basis of the text prepared by the other parties, mainly by the developed countries. New approaches of Asian countries have shown new innovations in their FTAs provisions. What was considered an unfeasible task has started becoming a reality. New experiments have been made. This chapter focuses on these new experiments and trends emerging from the State-to-State dispute settlement provisions of the FTAs of Asia. For this purpose, recently signed FTAs of China, South Korea and Japan with Australia will be considered. These three countries are powerful economies of Asia, and their approach in the dispute settlement in their FTAs can be considered as representative of the Asian trend. The FTAs under consideration in this chapter have also raised discussions on the Investor-State dispute settlement mechanism. For example, the Australia-China FTA has proposed to negotiate an appellate mechanism for Investor-State disputes, which is very innovative, and a hot topic in the international arena. However, as the focus of this chapter is on State-to-State dispute settlement, discussion on Investor-State disputes is beyond the scope of this chapter.