Abstract
International lawyers suggest that voluntary acceptance of the jurisdiction of a court or tribunal results in better compliance with judgments or awards issued from that instance. If a State freely consents to the procedure itself – the argument goes – it also accepts to be bound by the outcome of the procedure. Yet, this theory has been questioned in the context of judgments of the International Court of Justice, where it has been argued that neither the basis of jurisdiction nor the fact that jurisdiction was contested affects compliance. In this paper, we explore to what extent, and under what circumstances, jurisdictional objections by states are related to compliance with monetary awards in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) cases. In doing so, we theorize how variations in consent to ISDS on the part of the state might affect their willingness to comply with subsequent adverse awards. We also discuss the different ways states may signal objection to the jurisdiction of an ISDS tribunal through in-court pleadings. In our empirical analysis we rely on two novel datasets: one mapping the jurisdictional objections states make in ISDS cases, and one on compliance with ISDS awards. In addition to structured data, we interviewed state officials about the usage of jurisdictional objections in ISDS pleadings, and how, if in any way, States' positions on tribunals' jurisdiction feed into the decision on whether or not to comply with adverse awards.
Biography
Daniel Peat is an Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden Law School. His first monograph, Comparative Reasoning in International Courts and Tribunals (Cambridge University Press 2019) won the European Society of International Law Book Prize in 2020. Daniel holds a Ph.D. in Law from the University of Cambridge and worked at the International Court of Justice as an Associate Legal Officer for Judge Abdulqawi A. Yusuf before joining Leiden University.
His current research focusses on compliance with international legal obligations, exploring how insights from the behavioural social sciences might be used to understand the behaviour of actors in international law. He is a member of the COPIID project and this paper, co-authored with Tarald Gulseth Berge, is part of his work in that project.