Systemic Reflections on Argentina's Non-Compliance with ICSID Arbitral Awards: A New Role of the Annulment Committee at Enforcement?
Argentina’s non-compliance with arbitral awards has brought to the fore a question concerning compliance problems under the ICSID system. Argentina’s ignorance of its ICSID obligations might potentially undermine ICSID arbitration as an efficient mechanism for the resolution of investment dispute. In this paper, drawing from recent decisions on Argentina’s requests for stays of the award’s enforcement in annulment proceedings, the author considers that the annulment committees can be expected to play a more active role to facilitate a better compliance at the post-award enforcement stage. That is, in the face of persistent non-compliance, the annulment committees should take into account the possible inducement effect when they decide whether there has been appropriate assurance of compliance or decide what should be done so as to secure the compliance in their decisions concerning the stays. This should have important implications for the overall ICSID enforcement system in the future.
Value and Judgment in Investment Treaty Arbitration
Are international treaties consenting to the resolution of disputes between foreign investors and the host states to their investment still a good idea? Recent and not so recent criticism of such treaty provisions calls into question whether investor-state tribunals can act as neutral arbiters of such disputes. This criticism argues that tribunals are biased in favor of the business interests of investors — and therefore disfavor the state’s right to regulate. Responses to this criticism frequently have alleged the opposite: The arbitral tribunals constituted under international treaties are, if anything, too friendly towards the interests of states. They fail to protect the very economic interests of foreign investors that the treaties were designed to promote.
Women and Politics in Early Tudor England
Political historians working on the early Tudor period have traditionally concentrated on institutions – monarchy, council, parliament, courts, and administrative bodies – that excluded women. The very definition of politics underlying the dominant historiography has thus made it seem both natural and inevitable to write history as if the world of high politics, the world that really counted, were exclusively male.