In 2015, Brazil signed a new type of international investment agreement called Agreement on Cooperation and Facilitation of Investments (ACF1) with some African and Latin-American states. This article argues that the Brazilian ACFIs constitute a new investment agreement model. The latter is original in various aspects when compared to the majority of existing investment agreements. First, these agreements provide for governance institutions a Joint Committee and an Ombudsperson with the aim of permanently coordinating and facilitating the dialogue between states and investors. Accordingly, these institutions will strive to mitigate investment risks and to prevent the advent of disputes. In so doing, they are expected to soothe the investment climate and to provide a transparent legal regime for foreign investors during the whole life of their investments. As revealed by the recent investment reports of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, an efficient dispute prevention mechanism increases the confidence of concerned actors in the international investment legal regime. This was taken into consideration by Brazil while drafting the ACFIs. In a similar vein, the agreements make provision for civil society participation in specific cases. Secondly, the ACFIs innovate with an article on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Recommendations on CSR are addressed directly to the investors and even if non-binding, they can be used to construe the other provisions of the agreements by delimitating, for instance, the protection due to private companies as per their corporate social behaviour. In this sense, the ACFI can be described as a more balanced investment agreement. Interestingly, the ACFIs do not contain any provision on the fair and equitable treatment, indirect expropriation or on investor state dispute settlement mechanism: this contributes to their originality which is, to some extent, also criticized in this article.
