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international litigation blog

November 5, 2018 In Investment Court System, Investment Law By Julian Arato

A Watershed Moment for ISDS Reform

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Last week marked a watershed moment for the movement to reform investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Meeting in Vienna, Delegates to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Working Group III (WGIII) agreed to work multilaterally to reform the resolution of investment disputes. Delegates agreed to focus on responding to key systemic concerns with ISDS, as identified in WGIII’s two previous sessions.[1]

WGIII began its work on ISDS in Vienna last year, at its 34th Session. From the start, Delegates divided the process into three broad phases: identifying concerns about ISDS (Phase I); deciding which concerns, if any, were ripe for multilateral reform in UNCITRAL (Phase II); and designing options for reforms responding to any such concerns (Phase III). Phases I and II would be of prime importance in setting the frame. Though additional concerns can always be raised, any agenda for reform would be largely grounded in the problems identified in these early meetings. WGIII began its work identifying concerns with ISDS in 2017 and essentially concluded Phase I at its 35th Session in New York last Spring. By the end of that meeting, WGIII had identified a range of procedural and structural concerns with ISDS, relating to: (i) fragmented arbitral outcomes; (ii) the arbitrators charged with adjudicating disputes; (iii) matters of duration and cost; and (iv) third-party funding.READ MORE

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October 24, 2018 In Uncategorized By Quentin Decleve

European Court of Human Rights Rules That, If So Requested, CAS Hearings Must Be Public

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On 2 October 2018, the European Court of Human Rights (the ECtHR) held in the case of Mutu and Pechstein v. Switzerland that arbitration proceedings before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (the CAS) violated the right to a fair trial enshrined in Article 6, paragraph 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the ECHR) if those proceedings were not conducted publicly despite the express request of one of the parties.READ MORE

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October 10, 2018 In Investment Court System By Quentin Decleve

Report of Third EU Stakeholder Meeting on ISDS Reform

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Yesterday (9 October 2018), the European Commission held its third stakeholder meeting on the reform of investor-State dispute resolution (ISDS) mechanisms (see here and here for reports of the two previous meetings).

The goal of this meeting was (prior to the third round of discussions on the ISDS reform which will be held in Vienna (29 October – 2 November 2018) within UNICTRAL Working Group III (Working Group III)) to share with civil society the key aspects of those negotiations.

As was the case in the two previous meetings, Mr. Colin Brown (Deputy Head, Dispute Settlement and Legal aspect of Trade policy Unit) gave an overview of the current state of play, and responded to questions from attendees.READ MORE

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October 4, 2018 In Arbitration agreement, Intra-EU BIT By Quentin Decleve

Vattenfall v. Germany: Tribunal Subtly Avoids Applying Achmea Judgment and Finds that Article 26(6) ECT Does Not Apply to Jurisdiction Issues

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On 31 August 2018, the ICSID tribunal in Vattenfall v. Germany issued a decision addressing the consequences, for this case, of the Achmea judgment handed down by the Court of Justice of the European Union (the CJEU) on 6 March 2018 (see previous analysis of the Achmea judgment here and here).

The case at hand is a well-known investment dispute whereby a Swedish investor (Vattenfall) initiated arbitral proceedings against Germany seeking compensation for damages incurred following Germany’s decision to shut down all the nuclear power plants on its territory and to replace them with green energy alternatives. Vattenfall, which owned such nuclear power plants, argued that such decision amounted to an expropriation which violated the Energy Charter Treaty (the ECT – a multilateral agreement to which both Germany and Sweden were parties to, together with all other EU Member States, the European Union and several third countries (including Japan, and Central Asian countries)).

In the Achmea judgment, the CJEU ruled that an intra-EU investment arbitration case between two EU parties, a Dutch investor and Slovakia, violated EU law. However, in stark difference with the Vattenfall case (where the underlying basis for arbitration was the ECT’s investor-State dispute resolution clause provided for in Article 26), the basis for the jurisdiction of the arbitral tribunal in Achmea was the Czechoslovakia-Netherlands bilateral investment treaty (BIT).

Based on that judgment, and since the Vattenfall case also involved EU parties (i.e., a Swedish investor against an EU Member State), Germany argued that the arbitral tribunal in Vattenfall lacked jurisdiction since the findings of the CJEU in Achmea were “not limited to BITs between EU Member States, but must also be applied to multilateral agreement to which EU Member States are party, such as the ECT“.READ MORE

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September 27, 2018 In Intra-EU BIT, Recognition and enforcement of arbitral awards By Quentin Decleve

English Court of Appeal Stays Miculas’ Enforcement Proceedings

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On 27 July 2018 the English Court of Appeal (the Court of Appeal) confirmed the stay of UK enforcement proceedings of the 2013 arbitral award handed down in favour of the Micula brothers (the Miculas). Interestingly, the Court of Appeal’s ruling carefully navigates through the thorny interrelationship of the ICSID Convention and EU law.READ MORE

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September 18, 2018 In Arbitration agreement, Jurisdictional issues By Quentin Decleve

Brussels Court of Appeal Rules FIFA and UEFA Arbitration Clauses Inapplicable

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On 29 August 2018, in a case involving FIFA (the International Football Association) and UEFA (the European Football Association), the Brussels Court of Appeal (the Court of Appeal), issued an important decision refusing to refer the dispute to arbitration despite the existence of arbitration clauses providing for the jurisdiction of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).READ MORE

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September 13, 2018 In Applicable law(s), Jurisdictional issues By Pietro Ortolani

After Token Rush: International Litigation and Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) – Part 2

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This article considers some of the international litigation questions that arise out of Initial Coin Offering (ICO).

In the first part of this article, we discussed in particular issues relating to jurisdiction. We now continue this discussion while also considering questions relating to applicable laws.

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Issues of jurisdiction are made somewhat more complex by the circumstance that many ICO’s general terms and conditions (TnC) contain clauses that may directly or indirectly affect the jurisdiction of courts. In this respect, the most obviously relevant type of agreement are forum selection clauses; in the case of the Tezos ICO, for instance, the TnC specified that “(a)ny dispute arising out of or in connection with the creation of the [tokens] and the development and execution of the Tezos Network shall be exclusively and finally settled by the ordinary courts of Zug, Switzerland“. As noted by the District Judge denying the motion to dismiss, this is best understood not as a “clickwrap agreement“, but as a “browsestrap” one: when subscribing, investors were not asked to check a box indicating consent to the TnC, but simply enabled to retrieve the TnC on the website advertising the ICO. In order to determine whether the forum selection clause is binding, hence, a case-by-case assessment is necessary, evaluating whether – given the circumstances of the case, such as the structure of the website – it is reasonable to expect that users in general accessed the TnC, and whether the claimant(s) in particular had any demonstrable knowledge of the contents of the TnC.READ MORE

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