ICSID Reports

The International Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)

The ICSID reports provide an authoritative published collection of investor-State arbitral awards and decisions rendered under the auspices of the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), pursuant to other bilateral or multilateral investment treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) or involving investment contracts entered by States. These decisions, which are fully indexed, make an important contribution to the growing body of jurisprudence on international investment law.

The editors of the ICSID Reports are Professors Jorge Viñuales, University of Cambridge and Centre Fellow, and Michael Waibel, University of Vienna, and the assistant editor is Dr Oliver Hailes, London School of Economics.

The ICSID Reports are an invaluable tool for practitioners, scholars and government lawyers working in the field of public international law, investment treaty arbitration, and international commercial arbitration, whether advising foreign investors or States.

The series is also available online via Cambridge Core.

Volume 21 of the ICSID Reports

The upcoming Volume 21 focuses on Damages in Investment Arbitration, including an opening piece by Lucinda Low and an overview of the international law on damages in investment disputes by Professor Michael Waibel from the University of Vienna. As in previous volumes, this volume includes summaries, digests and excerpts of decisions rendered in the last decade in cases involving States from around the world. Case summaries and digests are written upon the invitation of the Editors by arbitration practitioners and international law researchers.

Volume 21 continues the direction of travel set since volume 18. It reports selected excerpts – rather than the full text – of certain decisions of particular relevance for the topical focus of the volume, Damages in Investment Arbitration. Each decision is introduced in an extended summary prepared by a network of law firms and colleagues, following a protocol that excludes conflicts of interests. A prominent academic/practitioner, in this case Lucinda Low, a former president of the American Society of International Law and a founding partner of Low & Kinnear Dispute Resolution, opens the volume with a reflection or a piece on a topic of her choice. As in previous volumes, one of the editors has prepared a preliminary study on the topic of the volume.

This approach is intended to gather the most relevant decisions concerning a given topic of general interest in a single volume and provide authoritative analysis of the state of law on it. Our initial selection of topics, with volume 18 devoted to defence arguments, volume 19 to the meaning of investment, and volume 20 to attribution of conduct to the State, hopes to cover a number of foundational aspects of investment law and arbitration before turning to more specialised issues.

Over time, we plan to devote some more space within each volume to commentary and analysis, in the form of symposium contributions or elicited studies but also, possibly, of research articles submitted for peer-review and potential publication, as is the practice in academic and professional journals.

As in previous volumes, volume 21 includes tables of cases reported in the volume and in the series, and a digest of issues arising from the reported cases.

20th Anniversary in 2021

The year 2021 marked the twentieth anniversary of the adoption by the International Law Commission, in second reading, of the Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, on 9 August 2001. It is also the year in which the last Special Rapporteur on this topic, Professor James Crawford, sadly passed away. As the Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge, a member of the International Law Commission, an influential scholar, practitioner and arbitrator and a Judge of the International Court of Justice, Professor Crawford’s contribution to the field of international law is profound and enduring. Professor Crawford also served as Co-General Editor of the ICSID Reports from 2004 until 2012 (volumes 6 to 16). 

Volume 20 is dedicated to his memory. It focused on Attribution of Conduct, including an opening piece by ICSID Secretary-General Meg Kinnear regarding the investor-State application of the International Law Commission’s Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts and an analytical study of the international law on attribution in investment disputes by Professor Jorge E Viñuales, Harold Samuel Professor of Law and Environmental Policy at the University of Cambridge. The volume includes summaries, digests and excerpts of decisions rendered between 2009 and 2020 in 16 cases involving States from across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, reflecting the breadth of contemporary practice on the attributable conduct of State organs, State-owned entities, and non-State actors in international investment law: Bayindir v. Pakistan, EDF v. Romania, Kardassopoulos v. Georgia, Hamester v. Ghana, Tulip Real Estate v. Turkey, Mesa Power v. Canada, Almås v. Poland, Flemingo DutyFree v. Poland, Saint-Gobain v. Venezuela, Ampal v. Egypt, Beijing Urban v. Yemen, Tethyan Copper v. Pakistan, Gavrilović v. Croatia, Unión Fenosa v. Egypt, Ortiz v. Algeria, and Strabag v. Libya. Case summaries and digests are written upon the invitation of the Editors by arbitration practitioners and international law researchers.
 

Available Volumes 

• Volume 20:  (ISBN: 9781107060678) 
• Volume 19:  (ISBN 9781107060623)
• Volume 18: (ISBN 978 1107 060616)
• Volume 17: (ISBN 978 1107 060609)
• Volume 16: (ISBN 978 0521 192613)
• Volume 15: (ISBN 978 0521 899895)
• Volume 14: (ISBN 978 0521 899888)
• Volume 13: (ISBN 978 0521 899871)
• Volume 12: (ISBN 978 0521 878043)
• Volume 11: (ISBN 978 0521 871709)
• Volume 10: (ISBN 978 0521 871693)
• Volume 9:   (ISBN 978 0521 861236)
• Volume 8:   (ISBN 978 0521 851275)
• Volume 7:   (ISBN 978 0521 841337)
• Volume 6:   (ISBN 978 0521 829885)
• Volume 5:   (ISBN 978 0521 813839)
• Volume 4:   (ISBN 978 0521 581363)
• Volume 3:   (ISBN 978 0521 475129)
• Volume 2:   (ISBN 978 0521 463409)
• Volume 1:   (ISBN 978 0521 463393)

More information on the series can be found at Cambridge University Press