Until recently, it was fair to decry the lack of attention paid to how ISDS tribunals quantify compensation, against evidence of ballooning awards and the sometimes dizzying amounts involved. Today, however, this issue is no longer secluded from public and academic scrutiny: it features prominently in critical scholarship and is probably the…

Sailing Yacht A in the Gulf of Trieste, seized in 2022 under the EU sanctions regime. It is well known that the EU has a complicated relationship with international investment arbitration. Whilst the two appear to be grounded in comparable commitments to a liberal international economic order, EU institutions have taken the view that investor-state dispute…

Last August, an ICSID tribunal handed down its much-anticipated ECT-based award in the dispute between Rockhopper, a British oil and gas company, and the Italian Republic. Rockhopper had been denied a licence to exploit an offshore oilfield, due to legislation banning oil production concessions within a certain distance from the coastline. The ban was adopted as a result…