In the last two decades, the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s (PCA) overall docket has seen a rapid growth in mixed arbitrations between States and private parties. Today, over 180 arbitrations are currently pending before PCA tribunals, of which more than 100 are investor-State disputes brought under bilateral and multilateral investment treaties and national investment laws….

Those applying treaties and interpreting them must remember two salient points: (1) as international adjudicators or as members of the judiciary they must apply a treaty not on the basis of discretionary powers and a judicial hunch but on the basis of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) and (2) lack of…

The Cold War era brought to life, in a strange way, a number of all-encompassing treaties dealing with major subjects such as international treaty-making, diplomatic relations, law of seas, etc. Even among the topics covered by these treaties were enforcement of foreign arbitral awards and investment disputes. However, it seems like the world has already…

The growing public interest in investment treaties and investor-State dispute settlement has prompted an increasing number of States to open to public view aspects of investment treaty negotiations. During the negotiation of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (‘TTIP’), for example, both the European Union and the United States sought to ‘maximise’ transparency in the…

The Vienna Convention rules for treaty interpretation (VCLT) routinely referred to by all international courts and tribunals are known to be the result of a compromise between different schools of interpretation and therefore notoriously flexible, in my view too flexible for the purposes of modern-day international dispute resolution. Cases are therefore won and lost according…

It is well settled in the practice of ICSID tribunals that the general rule of treaty interpretation embodied in Article 31(1) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (“Vienna Convention”) applies to the interpretation of the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (“ICSID Convention”). While…

Legal Reasoning: Interpreting and Applying the Law1)Mary Mitsi, The Decision-Making Process of Investor-State Arbitration Tribunals (Kluwer 2019). When analysing the process of legal decision-making what might first come to mind is the dichotomy between the interpretation and the application of the law. These terms, in some circumstances, may be employed interchangeably due to the strong…

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) was adopted and opened for signature on May 23, 1969, and entered into force on January 27, 1980. In the fifty years since the VCLT was opened for signature, it has become universally regarded as one of the most important instruments of treaty law. It has…