Title: Re-Discovering the Role of the Annulment Committee in Shaping International Investment Law Jurisprudence
Abstract: Much work has been done in the characterization of investment treaty awards as following a legal structure closer to the civil law concepts of jurisprudence constante/ arrêt de princip as opposed to the common law concepts of stare decisis & precedents. The two major sites where investment law jurisprudence takes shape are under the ICSID and UNCITRAL Rules framework. A distinct feature of the former is the presence of the Annulment Committee. The width of its review powers is considerably narrow as the grounds in which it can annul decisions being very restricted and do not extend to the examination of the merits of the claim. Though the annulment grounds are not modeled in a jurisdiction v. merits framework the effect of its structuring results in a fairly moderate review of an award on jurisdictional issues. The argument made in the paper is that the consequence of this distinction in the standard of review of the Annulment Committee has resulted in a relatively consistent set of awards qua jurisdictional issues which cannot be observed when one studies awards on merits. Thus the central thesis of the paper is that the presence of the Annulment Committee has had a salubrious effect on the development of jurisprudence around issues concerning jurisdiction. Whereas the development of law around substantial issues such as the width and scope of expropriation & FET clauses is still haphazard because the level of review afforded by the annulment Committee is too high to remedy such discrepancies. This trend has been further validated by the latest set of Annulment awards in 2010-2011 and this paper forms part of a series of research papers which would seek to validate the thesis by including these decisions in its study.
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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