The Hungarian Parliament has recently adopted a new Act on Arbitration, which will enter into force on 1 January 2018 (the Act). The new Act (based on the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration as amended in 2006 (the Model Law)) implements changes that are likely to have a considerable impact on the Hungarian…
“BITs and arbitration centers, such as ICSID, are an expression of an unjust moral order”, said Ecuador’s former President, Rafael Correa, back in 2014. Such animadversion led the country to denounce all its bilateral investment treaties (BITs) earlier this year. The Latin American nation’s feud with BITs and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment…
Recent political developments have resulted in considerable geopolitical uncertainty and presented challenges to the international order. With the UK’s vote to exit the European Union, the election of Donald Trump as US president, the Western sanctions against Russia, and the rising North Korea nuclear tensions, 2017 ushers in a turbulent time where commercial parties’ usual…
In January 2017, the new Rules of the Maritime Arbitration Commission at the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry were adopted (“MAC Rules”). The Rules implement new regulations which comply with the latest tendencies in arbitration. MAC was established in 1930 in Soviet Russia and since then it administered about 4,500 disputes. In 2016 –…
In the 2000s, mortgages in Swiss Franc (CHF) were very popular among consumers in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe for the acquisition of both private and commercial properties, as the CHF was a stable and reliable currency and offered lower interest rates than loans in Euro or in local currencies. When on 15 January 2015…
I. Introduction On 19 September 2017 the Advocate General (AG) to the Court of Justice to the European Union (CJEU) Melchior Wathelet delivered his long-awaited Opinion in Case C-284/16 Slowakische Republik v Achmea BV. As already explained in another post, Bundesgerichtshof (“German Federal Court of Justice”) requested a preliminary ruling from the CJEU on the…
The year 1993 saw a significant political transition in Cambodia through the adoption of democratic principles and free market economy. Since then, many legal reforms have been made in order to attract foreign direct investment, and one of which is providing a legal framework for protecting the investment. To date, the Kingdom has signed a…
Singapore and Hong Kong are now considered to be amongst the top arbitration seats in the world, rivalling the long-established seats of London, Paris and Geneva. Perpetuating their dominance in the region, parties to contracts in the Asia-Pacific often choose either of these seats by default with no consideration of alternatives. This is underpinned, to…
With Manuel Castelo-Branco, Carlos Aguiar, Francisco Prol, Paula Costa e Silva, Carlos Alberto Carmona, Duarte G. Henriques, Sofia Vale, João Ribeiro-Bidaoui, and João Vilhena Valério The massive programme of investments that will take place under the “One Belt, one Road” (OBOR) initiative of the People’s Republic of China leaves no one indifferent. With the aim…
Since the first application for provisional measures suspending criminal proceedings in Tokios Tokelés v. Ukraine (ICSID Case No. ARB/02/18, Order No. 3, 18 January 2005), the number of applications before ICSID tribunals for these types of measures has steadily increased. Recent applications have been widely commented on in the arbitration community, including in this blog….
Introduction It is not unusual that parties to FAI arbitration proceedings raise various jurisdictional objections before the Finland Arbitration Institute (“FAI”) and, provided that FAI will nonetheless allow the arbitration to proceed, subsequently also before the arbitral tribunal. Such objections come in all shapes and sizes. For example, respondent may dispute the existence of an…
For many doing business in Serbia, the local legal framework, including for arbitration, is the great unknown. However, a short introduction to this legal culture should suffice to reveal that when it comes to arbitration-related matters, Serbian laws are not so different from those in countries hosting some of the most popular arbitral seats. In…
The finality of an award is a key feature and attraction of arbitration as a method of dispute resolution. When an award is annulled at the seat, however, enforcing courts in secondary jurisdictions must decide between enforcing the award or honoring the seat-court’s nullification. This issue assumes significance in light of the recent judgment of…
On July 12, 2017, the Colombian Supreme Court issued a decision on the enforcement of the arbitral award rendered in the ICC case (No. 16088/JFR/CA) Tampico Beverages Inc. v. Productos Naturales de la Sabana S.A. Alquería, seated in Santiago de Chile. The decision provides for an interesting differentiation of the standard of review to be…
The long-standing tax dispute between India and the Vodafone, also previously discussed in here, recently entered new territory when India secured an ex-parte ad-interim injunction restraining the continuation of one of two bilateral investment treaty (“BIT”) arbitration proceedings initiated against it by the Vodafone group. A judge of the Delhi High Court granted this injunction on…
In a 172-page judgment, the Singapore High Court in Kingdom of Lesotho v Swissbourgh Diamond Mines (Pty) Limited [2017] SGHC 195 (Lesotho), set aside an investor-state arbitration award rendered against Lesotho after an extensive review of international investment jurisprudence. This is the second investor-state matter that has confronted the Singapore courts following Sanum Investments Ltd…
The HKIAC Rules Revision Committee (the “Committee”) is considering amendments to the current version of the HKIAC’s Administered Arbitration Rules, which came into force on 1 November 2013 (the “2013 Rules”). The 2013 Rules, while maintaining the “light touch” approach of the 2008 Administrated Arbitration Rules, made important contributions to international arbitration by introducing unprecedented…
Reliance on the investor-state dispute resolution (ISDS) mechanism of the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) is booming, with at least ten new cases registered in the past year alone. Notably, nine of these ten cases – and almost 60% of all publicly reported cases initiated to date – have been brought by an investor from a…
The decision of the Indian Supreme Court in A. Ayyasamy v. A. Paramasivam (‘Ayyasamy’) [(2016) 10 SCC 386] has been previously discussed on this blog here, and here. This post seeks to analyse the distinction between arbitrability of fraud concerning India-seated arbitrations and foreign-seated arbitrations created as a result of this judgment. The court in World…
Overview On May 1, 2017, the United States Supreme Court issued its unanimous decision in Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela v. Helmerich & Payne Int’l Drilling Co. (137 S.Ct. 1312). In its ruling, the Court addressed the expropriation exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (the “FSIA”). The expropriation exception permits plaintiffs to bring claims in…
A recent ruling of the DIFC Court of First Instance (see Claim No. ARB 003/2017 – Pearl Petroleum Company Limited & Others v. The Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq [2017] DIFC ARB 003) deals with the question as to whether a State immunity defence may be available to a State entity or a governmental defendant…
As on May 1, 2017, 60751 cases were pending in the Indian Supreme Court. Likewise, as per the data available, a total of 41,53,957 cases are pending in the twenty-four High Courts in India. The rate at which these cases are disposed, for various reasons like the vacancies for the position of judges, inefficient procedures,…
The primary purpose of an arbitration clause is to represent the parties’ common agreement to resolve disputes arising out of their contractual relationship by arbitration. One-way arbitration clauses, however, serve this primary purpose while giving only one party the right to commence arbitration proceedings. Consequently, the other party only has the option of approaching a…
These two-parts blog posts look into the ways that states can control the exercise of tribunals’ discretion and their implications. Of course, states can prevent unintended results from happening by simply adding more specific language to their new BITs. But what can they do with the existing treaties? Due process concerns Joint interpretative statements, as…
