Economic Activity Protection in the High Sea

According to the terms of the investment treaties, one of the conditions for sea economic activities is the link between such activities and the host state's maritime zones. Therefore, every move has the protection of treaties when they are within the national jurisdiction of the parties to the treaty. Hence, it is difficult to expand the protection of treaties for investment beyond national jurisdiction. Besides, the lack of clear regulations in this field challenges future investments. The fundamental question is how to gain protection under investment agreements beyond the maritime areas of states? The present paper aims to resolve the existing challenge using quantitative and qualitative methods and achieved results. First, in the analysis of investment agreements, Iran and the European Union have used three explicit, implicit, and silence approaches in defining the scope of their territory, and in this regard, in the "Energy Charter Treaty (1994)" and the "EU and Canada treaty (2016), which have taken an explicit approach on territory, have referred to the "nature of economic activity and investment" in response to the challenge, which is the solution to this challenge. Second, it does not encompass any kind of nature, but only implies the "nature of the economic activity and investment with a global approach" that can be applied more precisely to "investment or economic activity in cables and pipelines" because they have a global nature and are currently the only example of economic activity that steps into the high sea and to effective, the protection has to accompany with the economic activity. Therefore, by inferring from the case of "Deutsche Bank v. Sri Lanka" and the application of arguments on economic activity and investment in cables and pipelines with a global nature, the