In the wake of hotly contested domestic and international developments, speakers at the Annual ITA-ASIL Conference in Washington, DC on April 9 gave varied and sometimes conflicting perspectives on the use of mass and class claims in arbitration. Mass Claims in Investment Arbitration – A Favorable View In her keynote speech, Carolyn B. Lamm of…
I would like to continue the theme of the emerging convergence of investment arbitration and international trade. In my previous posts (see here and here) I discussed the prospect of using trade remedies to enforce investment arbitration awards. Another key example of convergence addresses the emerging trend of relying on investment arbitration to enforce international…
Readers of this blog are likely to be familiar with the existence of Bilateral Investment Treaties (“BITs”) and the wealth of arbitral awards made publicly available through the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (“ICSID”). Given the publicity afforded to proceedings under BITs, or multilateral investment treaties such as NAFTA, one might be…
Chair: Klaus Reichert SC (London) Main Speakers: Dr. Aloysius Llamzon (The Hague), Anthony Sinclair (London) Commentators: Utku Cosar (Istanbul), Carolyn B. Lamm (Washington, DC) Rapporteur: Elizabeth Karanja (Nairobi) No one would seriously challenge the proposition that investor wrongdoing is a systemic threat to international investment arbitration. But what constitutes investor wrongdoing? What are the standards…
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…
As reported earlier, the US Supreme Court has recently adjudicated on the issue of the standard of review in relation to arbitration agreements in international investment arbitration. It is a fact that the majority of the Court has decided that deference should be given to arbitral tribunals to examine questions of procedural conditions, as it…
Apropos of a recent decision in ConocoPhillips v. Venezuela (ICSID Case No ARB/07/30), this post discusses the potential underlying concerns an arbitral tribunal may consider when deciding whether it can revise earlier decisions within the context of fragmented proceedings. Background The ICSID proceedings in ConocoPhillips v. Venezuela (ICSID Case No ARB/07/30) commenced in November 2007…
Simon Lester has a thoughtful response to my earlier post about using trade remedies to enforce arbitration awards. He questions whether conditioning GSP benefits on compliance with arbitration awards is consistent with WTO obligations. My answer is essentially yes. Because there are so many issues at play, I thought it best to respond in a…
and Oleg Temnikov I. Foreword At the end of 2013, the Financial Times reported that a referendum will be held in Berlin on the question whether the State shall take over power supply from the hands of Vattenfall. We use this as an occasion to examine the legal implications in the field of investment arbitration…
As I discuss in a recent article published in the Santa Clara Journal of International Law, one of the most significant developments signaling the convergence of trade and arbitration is the use of trade remedies to enforce arbitration awards. This is done primarily when a developed country threatens to remove preferential trade benefits to a…
Introduction In BG Group v. Republic Argentina, a divided U.S. Supreme Court (“the Court”) continued to hold that arbitrators are the proper decision makers in gateway questions of arbitrability, not courts. The issue here concerned whether or not the local litigation requirement in the U.K-Argentina BIT was a procedural prerequisite to investor-state arbitration, or a…
An arbitral award (PCA Case No. 2011-17, 31 January 2014) arising out of the nationalisation of an electricity generation business in Bolivia has provided useful guidance on: (1) the ability of multiple investor claimants to bring joint claims against a state under separate BITs in a single proceeding; and (2) the time at which a…
By Carmen Núñez-Lagos and Javier García Olmedo In an award rendered on 31 January 2014, an arbitral tribunal constituted under the UNCITRAL Rules declined jurisdiction over the claims brought by one of two claimants against the Plurinational State of Bolivia on the basis of the application of a denial of benefits clause in the US-Bolivia…
Factual background On 4 October 2013 the Tribunal constituted under Metal-Tech Ltd.’s claim against Republic of Uzbekistan (G. Kauffman-Kohler, C. von Wobeser, J. Townsend) issued the award on jurisdiction in the ICSID case ARB/10/03. The peculiar factual background of the case has been previously discussed here. The approach taken by the Tribunal in this case…
and Luis Miguel Velarde Saffer Last December, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument on BG Group v Argentina – an appeal from a controversial and much-criticized decision of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The case arose out of emergency actions taken by the Republic of Argentina in late 2001 in the wake of…
It has been over two years since the DC Circuit Court of Appeals (“Circuit Court”) vacated an award in a bilateral investment treaty arbitration (BG Group PLC v. Republic of Argentina (UNCITRAL)) concluding that the panel did not have authority to adjudicate the dispute because the claimant had not satisfied a pre-arbitration requirement, namely, litigating…
On 4 October 2013, an ICSID tribunal rendered its decision in the investment treaty dispute between the Israeli company Metal-Tech Ltd. and Uzbekistan. In the award, the tribunal found that it lacked jurisdiction to hear the parties’ claims and counterclaims brought under the Israel-Uzbekistan BIT and Uzbek law due to corruption related to Metal-Tech’s investment…
Last year at about the same period, I reported on two major events that had been taking place in the world of Intra- and Extra-EU BITs, the Regulation establishing transitional arrangements for bilateral investments agreements between Member States and Third Countries, on the one hand, and the Electrabel decision, on the other. See blog of…
The “contribution of assets” requirement of the Salini test was often overlooked by commentators and tribunals, probably due to its “I-know-it-when-I-see-it” nature. The recent award in KT Asia Investment Group B.V. v Republic of Kazakhstan, however, demonstrates that a failure to meet the contribution requirement may put to rest a claim of an offshore company…
Investment arbitration under investment treaties between EU member states is a hot topic, in particular given the EU Commission’s strong views on the subject: As previously discussed here, the Commission has intervened in arbitrations in support of the position that the arbitral tribunal lacked jurisdiction to hear the dispute. One such matter was Eureko v….
and Rapolas Kasparavičius, LAWIN An abundant number of agreements have been and will be concluded between states and investors operating under the bilateral investment regime and even a larger number of negotiations will fail before reaching the final stage of signature. An investor may spend large sums of money with the aim of concluding an…
and Oleg Temnikov Foreword The tribunal in Mesa Power Group, LLC v. Canada (PCA Case No. 2012-17, Procedural Order No. 2, 18 January 2013) recently stated with regard to bifurcation of proceedings that: “[I]t is good… to let the parties ‘know where they stand’… at an early stage and not to impose the burden of…
Negotiations to establish a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement have been active and ambitious. Following 18 negotiating rounds since 2010, TPP talks now include 12 States, representing nearly 40 percent of global GDP. Scholars have observed that a TPP agreement, given its scale, could provide “staggering” economic benefits as well as a “genuine Asia-Pacific integration track.”…
Because international investment law so often involves the application of treaties, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties plays a key role in structuring its application. Of particular interest for many disputes are the rules of treaty interpretation contained in Articles 31, 32, and 33 of the VCLT. In that context, there are some…
