The Mongolian government has recently been required to pay one Canadian mining company approximately $100 million for expropriating that company’s uranium extraction licences in 2009. This sum is payable to Khan Resources Inc (Khan) pursuant to an arbitral award that is the climax of an arbitration proceeding initiated by Khan in 2011 as a result…
The Inaugural Conference of the European Federation for Investment Law and Arbitration (EFILA) took place on Friday, 23 January 2015, in the Senate House of the Queen Mary University of London. 160 participants ranging from academics, arbitrators, arbitration institutions, companies, lawyers to NGOs reviewed a full day long the EU’s first 5 years of European…
By Odysseas G. Repousis1)Research Assistant (HKU); PhD candidate (HKU), LLM in Arb&DR (Dist.-HKU), LLB (Hon.-UOA). Member of Young ICSID, of the ICC Young Arbitrators Forum and the Young International Arbitration Group. Email: odysseas@hku.hk. The author wishes to thank James D. Fry, Susan Karamanian and Tomasz J. Sikora for their wholehearted support and helpful feedback. The…
The notion of ‘investment’ has been one of the most controversial issues in arbitral proceedings instituted under the ICSID Convention. The award rendered by the UNCITRAL arbitral tribunal in Romak v. Uzbekistan has brought the issue outside of the ICSID context and concluded that, despite the broad definitions of ‘investment’ in Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs),…
On March 15, 2011 the Advocate General (“AG”) issued its opinion on an interesting matter which considers the relationship between EU law, a contract preceding the Republic of Slovakia’s accession into the EU and the Energy Charter Treaty and Investment Arbitration Agreement (essentially, a bilateral investment treaty applicable here). The dispute involves a contract dated…
Last year, around this time, I offered a list of 10 investor-state arbitral awards I hoped to see in 2010. If time permits, I may do another list for 2011. But, first I thought I’d take a look back at last year’s list and offer a brief update on those cases. Rather, than do all…
I have always found the submission of expert legal opinions on matters of international law to investment treaty tribunals rather odd. Why are expert opinions needed and what is their status? To begin, the opinion is submitted to an international arbitration tribunal often comprising leading public international lawyers (and sometimes current or former judges of…
On November 30, 2009, an arbitral tribunal issued three interim awards for Yukos Universal Limited, Hulley Limited Enterprises, and Veteran Petroleum Limited v. the Russian Federation under the Energy Charter Treaty (“ECT”). These interim awards addressed the issue of jurisdiction over the Russian Federation, analyzing the Provisional Application under Article 45(1) and (2), labeling the…
