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European ISDS Scorecard

A ranking of the harmful effects of 30 countries’ investment treaties

European governments have built a vast network of investment treaties that allow foreign investors to sue countries in private tribunals — bypassing national courts — over laws, regulations or court decisions that affect their investments or profit expectations. This system is known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS. Claims and payouts regularly reach hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, and cases have targeted climate policy, public health measures, and sanctions against Russia, among others.

Europe sits at the heart of this system: European countries invented ISDS, maintain over half of all bilateral investment treaties in force worldwide, and European investors have initiated 55% of all known ISDS cases — claiming a total of USD 513 billion.

The European ISDS Scorecard ranks 30 European countries — the 27 EU member states plus Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom — across 10 indicators that capture the scale of each country's treaty network, its policy direction, and the real-world use and financial impact of ISDS by its investors. The results reveal striking differences: a small group of countries at the top drives a disproportionate share of the treaties, the cases and the climate risk, while countries like Norway and Ireland demonstrate that a fundamentally different approach is possible.

The Scorecard ranks 30 European countries based on 10 indicators. The values of the indicators are normalised to a 0–1 scale against the highest-scoring country to make them comparable, then multiplied by each indicator's weight and summed up. The resulting scores are rescaled so the highest score equals 10.0 and a perfect score of no involvement in the ISDS system would equal 0.

The weights assigned to the indicators reflect the relative importance of each dimension: treaty network scope and activity (i1: 25%, i2: 10%, i3: 10%, i4: 5%), ISDS litigation volume (i5: 25%), climate exposure (i6: 5%, i7: 5%), financial stakes (i8: 5%, i9: 5%), and institutional membership (i10: 5%). For one indicator (treaty termination rate i2) a lower value signals better policy, hence the normalisation is inverted. The colour classifications (Critical, Significant, Moderate, Low, None) are based on thresholds assigned by the authors.

Classification levels:

Critical

Significant

Moderate

Low

None

Data provided by PowerShift e.V. / UNCTAD, April 2026A joint publication by PowerShift e.V., Alliance Sud, Climate Action Network Europe, European Trade Justice Coalition, Global Justice Now, Trade Justice Movement, TROCA, and Veblen InstituteIcons by Alum Design, RF_Design, iconisme, nangicon, Xin Corleone, BinikSol, ahmadwil, Arya Icons, Nabil, and shashank singh via The Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)