A/HRC/29/28 could play a significant role in reducing a company’s human rights risks, contributing to a company’s competitive advantage and strengthening its long-term financial stability.25 3. International investment agreements and dispute settlements 29. Carrying forward discussions about reforming the international investment agreements regime, in February 2015 UNCTAD convened a range of stakeholders from the investment and development community to identify strategies and action points for a sustainable development friendly international investment framework and improved global investment governance.26 The Guiding Principles can also serve as a useful reference for addressing some of the current failures of the international investment agreements regime, as they provide an agreed normative framework with benchmarks for assessing and informing government and corporate action to assess and address the adverse human rights impacts of business activities. 30. The world of international investment is both complex and fluid, and is characterized by a growing number of both international investment agreements and investor-State dispute settlement cases. At the end of 2014 there were 3,268 such international investment agreements and 608 known investor-State dispute settlement cases.27 In particular, the increasing number of investor-State dispute settlement cases has prompted debate about the legitimacy of the system, especially where high-profile negotiations on international investment agreements have been the subject of public controversy. The expansion in the use and interpretation of provisions in international investment agreements to protect investors and subject disputes to binding international arbitration has in a number of cases enabled investors to sue Governments for policies and regulations introduced to pursue public interest goals, such as new labour standards and environmental protection. The consequence may be that the States implicated are unable to preserve adequate policy space to meet their human rights obligations. 31. Some of the fundamental questions relating to reform of the international investment agreements regime indicate the relevance of the Guiding Principles. For example, there is an increasing realization that the success of investments requires not only the management of social and environmental risks, but also of adverse impacts on people. However, there is still not much experience in reflecting human rights risks in international investment tools. Moreover, given that investment is intended to enable development, the question arises of how investment tools should be designed to bolster, rather than undermine, the ability of host States to protect human rights and realize development goals. Such perspectives and experiences should be brought to the table in discussions on reforming the regime. The Working Group also considers that there is a particular need for empirical research on the links between the way in which investment agreements and arbitration operate and the impact on enjoyment of human rights. 4. Transparency in investment arbitration 32. A significant opportunity for increasing transparency in the area of investor-State arbitration has arisen from work of the Working Group on Arbitration and Conciliation of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). The UNCITRAL Working Group started working on transparency in 2010, with a mandate that stressed the importance of ensuring transparency in investor-State dispute settlements 25 www.ungpreporting.org/early-adopters/investor-statement/. 26 http://unctad-worldinvestmentforum.org/followup-events/single-year-expert-meeting/. 27 UNCTAD, International Investment Agreements Issues Note No. 1, February 2015. 9