According to Advocate General Maciej Szpunar, the Micula case is symbolic of the ‘conflictual relationship’ between EU law and international investment law. Indeed, the European Commission has persistently objected to the execution of the ICSID award issued in Micula, not because of the principles of autonomy and mutual trust that underpinned the Achmea judgment, but…

“the money’s not about the money…The key to settlement lay not in the realm of calculation and rationality but in the more opaque social world of face, punishment, justice and emotion.” Charlie Irvine in Not about the money? The end of 2019 and the start of 2020 offered a rich variety of posts on the…

Introduction With less than a month to go before the latest EU-UK divorce date, the UK Supreme Court resumed its hearing in Micula et al. v Romania 2018/0177, relating to the enforcement of the widely discussed ICSID award against Romania. With the UK grappling with its future relationship with the EU, it is interesting timing…

On 7-8 June 2019, the ninth (Romanian) National Conference on Commercial Law in Cluj-Napoca was organized by the Department for Company Law and Corporate Governance of the Law Faculty of the University Babeş-Bolyai in Cluj-Napoca (Romania), together with the Center for Commercial Law of the West University of Timişoara (Romania), supported by the Romanian National…

The Question The question of enforcing arbitral awards which had been subject to set-aside proceedings at their seat is long-standing in academic debate1) For instance, Nadia Darwazeh, Article V (1)(e), in Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards: A Global Commentary on the New York Convention 301, 307-09 (H. Kronke, P. Nacimiento et al. eds.,…

 ‘By putting its head in the sand, the ostrich can see no problems, and if it can’t see any problems, they don’t exist”[1] To what extent can legal systems differ? Can these differences be legitimate enough to collapse a “conflictive” legal system? These two ambitious questions are difficult to be answered in one go, and…

Why is the evolution of international commercial arbitration important for Romania? First of all, Romania has a significant geostrategic position: it lies at the crossroads of three large international markets: the European Union, the Balkans and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Romania is the access gate of the East to the single market of the…