Australia's rejection of investor-state dispute settlement: Four potential contributing factors

For nearly two decades, the tobacco industry has used international investment rules to challenge government restrictions on cigarette marketing. In 1994, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company threatened to bring a claim under the North American Free Trade Agreement's (NAFTA) investment chapter as part of its successful lobbying campaign against Canada's proposed "plain packaging" legislation, which would have required that all cigarettes be sold in standardized packaging without logos or trademarks. More recently, Philip Morris has brought an investor-state claim challenging Uruguay's restrictions on cigarette packaging, and formally threatened the government of Australia with an arbitration claim in response to its packaging rules.