PCA Hosts Virtual Roundtable on ‘The Mutually Reinforcing Relationship between the VCLT and ISDS'

The Permanent Court of Arbitration is delighted to be hosting a virtual roundtable discussion on ‘The Mutually Reinforcing Relationship between the VCLT and ISDS’ via Zoom on 5 October 2022, 11:00am – 16:15pm CEST. Sign up here!

Discussions will be inspired by the recently published book The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties in Investor-State Disputes: History, Evolution, and Future, edited by Esmé Shirlow and Kiran Nasir Gore (Wolters Kluwer, September 2022), which also features a chapter co-authored by Dirk Pulkowski, PCA Senior Legal Counsel, and Ashwita Ambast, PCA Legal Counsel.

A number of the book’s contributing authors will sit in conversation with PCA lawyers over the course of three sessions of roundtable discussions. Confirmed discussants include: Ashwita Ambast, Devin Bray, Judge Charles N. Brower, Anna Crevon-Tarassova, Malgosia Fitzmaurice, Aikaterini Florou, Kiran Nasir Gore, Barton Legum, Dimitrios Papageorgiou, Dirk Pulkowski, Agnes Rydberg, Esmé Shirlow, and Michael Waibel.

The first session, The VCLT & ISDS: A Reinforcing Relationship, will focus on the ways in which investor-State arbitration and treaty practice reinforce the VCLT’s rules and framework, and, in turn, how the VCLT may itself serve to reinforce investment treaty law and arbitration. The focus will be on the role of the VCLT in investor-State disputes, including how arbitral decisions referring to the VCLT – including as customary international law – reinforce the VCLT’s rules.

The second session, The VCLT & ISDS: A Restraining and Regulating Relationship, will focus on the ways in which the VCLT’s rules restrain or regulate the approaches of investor-State tribunals and/or treaty parties in relation to the protection of foreign investment. The discussion will encompass how the VCLT regulates and restrains the interpretation of investment treaties, entry and exit from investment treaties, and the VCLT’s relevance to reform initiatives and to how investment treaties and arbitration may develop over the coming decades.

The final session, The VCLT & ISDS: A Relationship of Replacement?, will focus on how investment treaties, and the approaches of investor-State arbitration tribunals, may be diverging from the approaches to treaty law established in the VCLT (for example by establishing a lex specialis) or from the approaches to treaty law adopted by other international courts and tribunals.

Please sign up to be part of our virtual audience! Individuals can sign up to specific sessions, or the day’s entire program. A copy of the full program can be found here.