Opting Out of ICSID and BITs: Legal and Economic Effects
The purpose of this article was initially to review the countries that had left ICSID, terminated BITs, or refused to enter into ICSID or to conclude BITs, to determine the reasons and mechanisms behind their decisions, and finally to ascertain whether these decisions made sense from an economic point of view. The focus was in particular on the South American countries and Australia.
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The Commission’s factsheets: a declaration of faith in the EU BITs world?
The course of this year was marked by another event that ended up to be much ado about nothing, the order granted in the matter Slovakia v. Eureko by the German Federal Supreme Court according to which the proceedings before it were redundant. These proceedings, in which the Commission had intervened to support the position that the arbitral tribunal lacked jurisdiction, had been brought by the Dutch company Eureko against the Slovak Republic under the Dutch-Slovak BIT (thus an intra-EU BIT). The arbitral tribunal held that it had jurisdiction because the BIT was fully valid and had not been terminated by the Slovak Republik’s accession to the EU.
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Latest Developments Concerning European Bilateral Investment Treaties
Two major events have taken place recently regarding the situation of Bilateral Investment Treaties concluded between European Member States (“Intra-EU BITs”) and Bilateral Investment Treaties concluded between an European Member State and a State not Member of the EU (“Extra-EU BITs”). The fate of these agreements was surrounded up until now by a veil of uncertainty.
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