On 30 December 2020, the European Union and China announced their Agreement in Principle for the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI). This is a landmark development for both parties in these long-running negotiations which began in 2012. On 22 January 2021, in the interest of transparency, Brussels published certain draft sections (here) of the … Read more

On 29 August 2020, the Agreement for the Termination of Bilateral Investment Treaties (the “BITs”) between the Member States of the European Union (the “EU”) (the “Termination Agreement”) entered into force. As discussed in one of our previous blog posts, the Termination Agreement was signed on 5 May 2020 by 23 EU Member States. In … Read more

On 5 May 2020, 23 Member States of the European Union (the “EU”) signed an Agreement to terminate the Bilateral Investment Treaties (“BITs”) between them (the “Termination Agreement”). Read more

In Micula and others (Respondents/Cross-Appellants) v Romania (Appellant/Cross-Respondent) [2020] UKSC 5 the UK Supreme Court (the “SC”) found that the duty of sincere cooperation under EU law does not preclude enforcement of an ICSID Convention (the “Convention”) award against Romania (the “Award”). In what is the enforcement stage of the long-running and well-known saga of … Read more

On 12 February 2020, the European Parliament (“EP“) gave its consent to the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (“EU-Vietnam FTA“) and the Investment Protection Agreement (“EU-Vietnam IPA“). The consent from the EP paves the way for approval of the two agreements by the EU Council of Ministers next month. In brief, the EU-Vietnam FTA focuses on … Read more

In October 2019, the European Commission (the “Commission“) presented four proposals (the “Proposals“) to the Council of the European Union (the “Council“) with specific rules to establish the Investment Court System (“ICS“) envisaged under the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (“CETA“). If the Council and the EU Member States approve the Proposals, the EU … Read more

The draft Withdrawal Agreement has finally been amended to replace the previous Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland with a new Protocol taking a rather different approach to securing the objective of avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. We will describe below the main features of the new approach and then … Read more

We are pleased to be hosting the fifth Annual Conference of the European Federation for Investment Law and Arbitration (EFILA), to take place on 30 January 2020 at Herbert Smith Freehills’ offices in London. This year’s conference will focus on ‘Investment Protection in the EU: Alternatives to Intra-EU BITs’, and will cover the topics: Investment/investor … Read more