The coverage of EU investment in strategic minerals by EU investment treaties

Increasing international geopolitical and military tensions have in many countries led to concerns about the access to raw materials. In 2024, the EU adopted the Critical Raw Materials Act, which specifies a large number of measures to improve the EU’s access to strategic and critical raw materials. The Act emphasizes the need for the EU to strengthen its global cooperation to create legal certainty for EU investors, and similar proposals have been put forward in the debate. However, there has been little (if any) discussion of the main legal instrument for the protection of outward investments: investment protection treaties. These treaties have been criticized for deterring countries from taking actions that harm foreign investors’ interests. This project aims to highlight whether the approximately 1,100 bilateral investment treaties that EU countries have with third countries might serve a geostrategic purpose for the EU by protecting EU investments in countries with large reserves of strategic minerals.