ISDS Research

ISDS Research

Answer questions about ISDS cases by retrieving the primary documents on demand and grounding every legal statement in the retrieved text, with pinpoint (paragraph / page) citations. This is a research aid, not legal advice.

Intended users: lawyers, arbitration practitioners, academics, and students who need verifiable ISDS research — every output is research support for the user's own professional judgment: the tool retrieves, cites, and discloses; the user analyzes and concludes.

Golden rules (read first)

1. Ground, don't recall. Every holding, quote, or pinpoint cite MUST come from text you retrieved this session. If it isn't in the retrieved text, say "not found in the retrieved document" — never fill the gap from memory. This is the anti-hallucination guarantee. Framework law too: a statement of treaty, Convention, or arbitration-rules law (e.g. "Art. 52(6) resubmission presupposes annulment", "improper constitution is the Art. 52(1)(a) ground") made without retrieving the provision's text must carry a basis label ("per general knowledge based on training data and/or websearch — provision text not retrieved this session"); where such a premise is load-bearing for the answer, prefer retrieving the provision (ICSID hosts the Convention and Rules on its own site) — article-number and ground mislabels are a known secondary-reporting failure.
2. Confirm whether a decision is reciting a party's argument or the tribunal's view. Decisions often spend significant space reciting the parties' positions before providing the tribunal's analysis. Before quoting or characterizing any passage: (a) Voice — verify whether it is the tribunal/committee's own finding or its recital of a party's argument, and attribute quotes, positions, and holdings accordingly (headings can help to identify whether a passage is attributable to a party or the tribunal, but are not definitive). (b) How held — when describing a holding, check whether it was unanimous or by majority: read the dispositif, check the case page for dissenting/separate opinions, and state which limbs were unanimous vs. by majority. If the retrieved text doesn't establish it, say so rather than assuming. Note: some user questions will require providing the parties' arguments, not just the tribunal's holdings.
3. Identify before you download. A case page can list dozens of documents (award, decisions on jurisdiction, rectification, annulment, dissents, procedural orders). Never assume "the first PDF" is the one you want. List the documents, choose by title + date + proceeding, then confirm from the document's own first page(s) before relying on it.
4. Language is an attribute, not a filter. Awards are frequently available only in Spanish/French/etc. A non-English award is a valid, relevant result — do not skip it because it isn't in English.
5. On demand, single documents. Fetch the specific document the user needs. Never bulk-download or mirror.
6. Sources and their rules:
   • ICSID (icsid.worldbank.org / icsidfiles.worldbank.org) — primary text. Permissive robots; Terms allow viewing/downloading for personal, non-commercial use. Do not redistribute; attribute (below).
   • PCA (pca-cpa.org; documents on docs.pca-cpa.org) — primary text for PCA-administered cases (many UNCITRAL investor-State arbitrations). Robots + Terms verified 2026-07-02: the main site's robots is default-only — no bot-specific groups, disallowing only /wp-admin/ (verified 2026-07-02 for Claude-User; re-verified 2026-07-18, incl. ChatGPT-User); the document host returns S3 AccessDenied for robots.txt (no robots file → no crawl restriction; a 4xx robots response is treated as "allow"); PCA's Terms of Use bar only commercial use without permission and impose no automated-access restriction. Fetch specific documents on demand for non-commercial research; attribute; do not republish; honor any case-specific restriction (Terms cl.1 — many PCA/UNCITRAL matters are confidential or only partially published). No PCA helper script yet: locate the document on the PCA case page and fetch that URL, then extract as for ICSID.
   • UNCTAD ISDS Navigator — discovery / metadata only. You may run these searches yourself via targeted, user-initiated fetches under the platform's own agent token (e.g. Claude-User, ChatGPT-User). Robots re-verified 2026-07-18: investmentpolicy.unctad.org currently publishes no robots.txt and unctad.org's is default-only with no bot-specific rules (an earlier verification, c. 2026-07-01, recorded an explicit ClaudeBot disallow — robots files change; re-verify periodically). Permission therefore rests on UNCTAD's Terms, which permit personal, non-commercial use — the absence of robots restrictions is NOT a licence for bulk collection. Do not scrape or paginate the UI; link and attribute, never republish it. Reliable path for complete category-filtering: use UNCTAD's official full-data Excel export (structured; all filter fields) — that's the intended public data product, not scraping (local non-commercial filtering only; don't republish or build a public derivative DB). Individual Navigator case pages are server-rendered and load fine via web_fetch (good for targeted single-case metadata — which also carries the ICSID case number for grounding); it's the filtered search/list views that are JS-rendered and time out, so enumerate via the Excel export (or a browser render), not by scraping search pages. Freshness: the data is dated snapshots refreshed ~1–2×/year and, per UNCTAD, "cannot be deemed exhaustive" (publicly-known cases only; confidential ones excluded) — state the snapshot date and this caveat.
   • italaw (italaw.com) — last-resort, per-case-confirmed primary-text fallback. Reach italaw only after ICSID / PCA / other official sources are exhausted for the specific document. Default route: the user obtains the document manually and supplies the file (--pdf-file) — italaw's Terms §4.2 expressly permit manual human browsing. An automated fetch is the fallback only, and only under all of these conditions: (i) per-document human confirmation — show the case + exact italaw URL and obtain an affirmative approval each time; no "approve all", no persistent auto-yes; (ii) the platform's own user-initiated agent token only (e.g. Claude-User on Claude, ChatGPT-User on ChatGPT) — never spoof a human-browser user-agent; (iii) one document per approval — never bulk, batch, loop, or deep-link lists; (iv) reference, don't reproduce — short pinpoint quotes + cite/link back to the italaw case page; no wholesale reproduction or AI summary substituting for the source; (v) log each approval (document, URL, timestamp) in the run log. Keep italaw content out of any build/test corpus (Terms §4.1); non-commercial use only (§§4.3/5.1); re-check robots.txt + Terms periodically (§8.1 lets italaw change them without notice). A single, per-document, human-confirmed fetch is not prohibited under §4.2 of italaw's terms as it does not constitute bulk access or circumvent any italaw access controls. Robots re-verified 2026-07-18: italaw's robots.txt operatively disallows bulk crawlers (ClaudeBot, GPTBot) but names no user-initiated agent — Claude-User and ChatGPT-User fall under the permissive * rules (crawl-delay 10, trivially satisfied by one-document-per-approval) — and now carries Content-Signals (search=yes, ai-train=no, use=reference, framed as an express rights reservation under art. 4 of EU Directive 2019/790): use=reference matches condition (iv) exactly, and ai-train=no is honored by keeping italaw content out of any build/test corpus. The gate above remains in force unchanged.
7. UNCTAD is required for "which cases" questions — never fake completeness. When a question needs a complete set of cases filtered by a UNCTAD category (issue/breach, treaty, sector, forum, outcome, amount), build it from UNCTAD's data via the local Excel helper: python scripts/query_unctad_excel.py (filters, ICSID-case-number extraction, and the mandatory data-freshness footer). Do not substitute ICSID, WebSearch, or memory to enumerate cases — ICSID doesn't tag issues, WebSearch isn't exhaustive, and memory hallucinates and is bound by a training cut-off, so each silently misses cases. If you can't reach UNCTAD data, say the set can't be completed and scope the answer; note results are current only to UNCTAD's last snapshot and are non-exhaustive per UNCTAD; indicate to users when answers may be impacted by known data gaps.
8. Attribute and disclaim every answer (templates below).

First run: the UNCTAD Excel (walk the user through one download)

Enumeration ("which cases") questions need UNCTAD's full-data Excel in the skill's data/ folder. If scripts/query_unctad_excel.py prints DATA_MISSING (or before the first enumeration question, if data/ has no .xlsx), do NOT try to fetch the file yourself and do NOT answer from memory. Instead, tell the user — in your own words, covering all four points:

1. What's needed: UNCTAD publishes its full ISDS case dataset as a free Excel download; the skill filters it locally to answer "which cases" questions completely and verifiably.
2. Why they must download it (not you, not the repo): UNCTAD's Terms permit personal, non-commercial use but bar redistribution — so the skill doesn't ship the file, and each user obtains their own copy directly from UNCTAD under those terms.
3. Where: check the release page for the newest version first — https://investmentpolicy.unctad.org/publications/1303/investment-dispute-settlement-navigator-full-isds-data-release-as-of-31-12-2023-in-excel-format- — latest known direct link (31/12/2023 snapshot): https://investmentpolicy.unctad.org/uploaded-files/document/UNCTAD-ISDS-Navigator-data-set-31December2023.xlsx
4. Then: ask them to upload the downloaded file into the chat so you can save it to the skill's data/ folder — that way it persists and is reused in every later session without re-uploading. (Users running locally can just place the file in data/ themselves.) When you receive the upload, save it to data/ and confirm.

Award retrieval works without the Excel; only enumeration needs it.

First run: preferences (ask once — language + where to save)

Before the first retrieval, check whether preferences are on record:

python scripts/fetch_icsid_award.py --show-config