Chief Legal Advisors Forum 2026 - Welcome Address by Attorney-General, Mr Lucien Wong S.C.

Your Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, a very good morning and welcome to Singapore.

Introduction

It is my great pleasure to welcome all of you to the Chief Legal Advisors Forum (CLAF) 2026 in Singapore.

We held the inaugural edition of CLAF two years ago in 2024 in Singapore. Some of you may have been here and the impetus for this was simple. We found that international dispute resolution was on the uptick, with tribunals such as the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”) facing an unprecedented caseload. This was evident not only in contentious proceedings before the ICJ, but also in advisory proceedings raising issues of global policy significance. Other institutions like the Permanent Court of Arbitration (“PCA”) and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (“ICSID”) were similarly facing higher volume of cases brought against States by investors.   

This judicial activity was significant not only because of its volume, but because of its character. The disputes increasingly sat at the intersection of law and policy, and their procedures unfolded under heightened scrutiny from multiple stakeholders.

These were challenges that virtually all of us in this room have encountered, and will continue to encounter, in our work. And yet, we lacked a platform for government legal advisors engaged in international dispute resolution policy and cases to meet, to dialogue, share experiences and collaborate. In contrast, there are platforms for prosecutors, for example, such as the International Association of Prosecutors - or for legislative draftsmen, such as the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel. But there has been no platform such as CLAF.

In response to this gap, we convened CLAF in 2024. We brought together the Chief Legal Advisors and representatives from around 20 jurisdictions. They were here for high-level exchanges on the latest trends and challenges in international dispute settlement, and in particular investor-State dispute settlement (“ISDS”). That first edition of CLAF confirmed what many of us already sensed: that government legal advisors needed a dedicated forum to exchange experiences, test ideas, and build practical cooperation. This second edition of CLAF therefore returns to that conversation with a sharper focus on ISDS, where the challenges for States have become especially acute.

The theme for this edition of CLAF is “States and Investment Disputes – What lies ahead”. In my remarks today, I would like to address the factors that had contributed to the increased complexity of ISDS today, and our role as legal advisors to guide our governments in navigating this complexity.

The increasing complexity in ISDS

There are several contributing factors to the complexity of ISDS, some of which are interlinked. I will just highlight three related sources: first, the density of the treaty network; second, the breadth of substantive protections and their interaction with regulatory space; and third, the uncertainty generated by a system without binding precedent.

To begin with, the sheer number of international investment agreements (“IIAs”). According to data from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (“UNCTAD”), there are at least 2,661 IIAs comprising bilateral investment treaties (“BITs”) and investment chapters in free trade agreements, in force as at 2025. The proliferation of such agreements is a function of an increasingly interconnected global economy. These agreements provide meaningful protections for investors while facilitating cross-border flow of capital to drive economic development in host States.

But this growth also has been a double-edged sword – the same network of treaties that has facilitated investments has also furnished the legal architecture that has spawned litigation. Given the many geographical and substantive overlaps within the dense network of agreements, often a single investment dispute could implicate multiple treaties. Investors have become sophisticated in navigating these intersections, which has resulted in more forum shopping and parallel proceedings. Quite simply, more treaties have resulted in more litigation risk for States.

Second, this picture is rendered more complex by the fact that many of the IIAs, which were concluded in the 1990s and 2000s, they contained expansive investment protection standards. For example, the open-textured fair and equitable treatment provision, one of the most common provisions in IIAs, has given rise to countless disputes and interpretations in many arbitral proceedings. There is thus a wider range of State conduct that could give rise to a compensation claim. This, I am afraid, is a sobering reality, especially when such old-generation agreements continue to form the large majority of the IIAs in force today.

Measures that a government might once have regarded as a straightforward exercise of domestic regulatory authority can now be potentially characterised as a treaty breach. The tension between ISDS risk and a State’s sovereign regulatory prerogative has played out across a number of domains. I will give two examples.

1. In public health, there were two notable cases where Philip Morris, as we know is a multinational tobacco company, commenced claims against Australia and Uruguay to challenge their respective tobacco packaging regulations. Fortunately, in both these cases, the States ultimately prevailed.
   

2. By contrast, in relation to environmental protection, Colombia, which had halted a mining project to protect a vital water-source and eco-system, was found liable to the investor for breach of its investment treaty obligations.

The threat of a crippling compensation payout and its chilling effect on a State’s regulatory space is very real and not merely academic.

This is not to suggest that all ISDS claims are without merit. There will be cases where State conduct plainly falls short of treaty obligations and causes real prejudice to investors. But as genuine regulatory imperatives increasingly intersect with foreign investor interests, difficult questions arise about how best to balance investment protection with regulatory autonomy — and about whether arbitral tribunals are always the best forum to resolve questions with far-reaching policy implications.

This brings me to the third thread of complexity, and one which is probably of greatest concern to legal advisors, and that is, with more disputes has come greater, not lesser, uncertainty in the law. Because ISDS arbitral tribunals are constituted ad-hoc for a particular dispute and are not bound by precedent decisions of other tribunals, it is not uncommon for different tribunals to reach diametrically opposite conclusions on the interpretation of similarly worded provisions in different treaties.

There has also been a high degree of variance in the assessment of costs and damages across cases involving comparable facts or comparable regulatory measures, with quantum outcomes that can differ vastly depending on the tribunal, the methodology adopted, and the experts engaged.

The cumulative effect of these three threads — treaty proliferation, expansive substantive standards colliding with regulatory space, and a system without binding precedent — this has created a landscape that is dense, more contested, and less predictable than before. The international investment regime may have grown in scale and ambition, but internal coherence in ISDS has not always kept pace with that growth.

Therefore, the challenges that this poses for States are manifold. It is difficult to advise a government on its regulatory posture without worrying about litigation exposure. It is difficult to settle a dispute when neither party can predict with confidence what an arbitral tribunal would award. And it is difficult to design policy when the acceptable parameters under international law are not well-defined.

The role of the legal advisor

If this is the landscape in which States now operate, the role of the government legal advisor - that is many of you here - must also evolve. We cannot eliminate all the structural risks in ISDS, but we can help our governments anticipate, manage, and shape them. I offer some suggestions in this vein.

First, a legal advisor needs procedural fluency across the full range of dispute resolution modalities.

1. A legal advisor should be well versed not just in arbitration (which has been the traditional mechanism in ISDS) but also mediation and conciliation. By being conversant in these options not as isolated alternatives but as tools that can be deployed in combination and sequenced strategically, we may be able to avoid the strain of a wholly adversarial pathway while delivering to our governments a result that is both just and expedient.
   

2. Next, mastery of procedural rules – whether UNCITRAL rules, ICSID rules, the PCA or other institutional rules – and their respective intricacies, can help a legal team make quicker tactical calls on how to respond to parallel proceedings, how to manage jurisdictional objections or requests for provisional measures. This can all shape the trajectory and outcome of a case.
   

3. Having both legal acuity and sound judgment to advise on arbitral appointments is also a vital asset. Arbitral appointments and challenges to appointments have become an increasingly fraught exercise capable of generating its own satellite litigation and this could delay proceedings, generate costs, and in some cases fundamentally alter the outcome of an award. For example, an ICSID ad hoc committee annulled an arbitral award entirely, having found that the claimants’ appointed arbitrator failed to disclose professional connections and a conflict of interest with the claimants’ damages expert. Advising on arbitrator selection is therefore crucial and requires not just knowledge of the candidate’s jurisprudential leanings, but also a careful assessment of their professional relationships and potential conflicts.

Second, a legal advisor in the ISDS space cannot singularly be an expert on international investment law alone, but he must be able to move between intersecting legal regimes. A State's conduct in any given case will typically be governed not only by the applicable investment treaty, but also by domestic law — including domestic frameworks on human rights, environmental protection, and trade regulation. The international and domestic regimes do not always point in the same direction, and thus a legal advisor must be capable of mapping these intersections, identifying the tensions, and developing a coherent legal strategy that accounts for the full range of applicable obligations.

This leads me to the last and perhaps the most forward-looking dimension of a legal advisor’s role. Increasingly, legal advisors are called upon not only in the management of a crystallised dispute, but are roped in even further upstream to contribute to policy design, for example, in advising on the structure of a State's domestic investment regime, or developing a template for the government’s BITs that narrows down the scope of potential issues that could be subject to ISDS. But beyond domestic policy, legal advisors may also be called upon to contribute to the redesign of the international regime more broadly.

I am referring of course to the ongoing work of UNCITRAL Working Group III on ISDS reform, which – thanks to the contributions of many of you in this room – the Working Group has produced many ambitious proposals for reform, ranging from the establishment of a standing multilateral investment tribunal, the establishment of an advisory centre to facilitate capacity building and support for states to handle international investment disputes, and a Code of Conduct for investment arbitrators, to name a few of the suggestions. This is just one illustration of how legal advisors are no longer simply users of the system, but active participants in reshaping it. I really hope that these Working Group suggestions will be taken up and implemented.

Conclusion

As State legal advisors, we are no longer merely disputes practitioners, but we have to evolve towards becoming systems thinkers — attentive to treaty architecture, procedural strategy, the interface between domestic and international law, and the broader project of institutional reform. It is a challenging role, but also a privileged one too because few areas of legal practice sit so directly at the intersection of law, policy, and the practical business of governing in the public interest.

The good news is that we are not alone in taking up this mantle. There is comfort in the knowledge that just within this room alone, there are many of us who can already identify with the same issues and experiences.

There is value therefore in learning from the experiences of others, to identify best practices or opportunities for collaboration, and this is where platforms like CLAF can play a role to foster these conversations. We may come from different legal traditions, different cultural backgrounds, different domestic priorities, but that can only enrich rather than hinder our ability to find global solutions to issues of common concern. We are proud that CLAF has doubled in participation this year with more than 40 countries, a regional economic integration organisation, and intergovernmental organisations being represented in this room. This participation will only deepen the quality of our discussions and collectively strengthen our analysis.

The next two days are the start, but not the end of the conversation. If CLAF can help us build trust, exchange practical experience, and develop common approaches where our interests align, then it will have served a purpose beyond dialogue. It will help us strengthen international dispute resolution in a way that better serves States, investors, and the public interest.

So, I hope all of you in this room will find benefit in attending CLAF and contributing to the discussion during the next two days, and that you find it useful perhaps for a third iteration of CLAF – maybe two years later, maybe in Singapore or in some other country.

I wish all of you a beneficial and productive attendance at CLAF. Thank you.