The Maldives is an island nation having around 5,40,000 people and dispersed across 185 islands. The country has been a development success enjoying robust growth coupled with considerable development of the country’s infrastructure and connectivity. It has also provided high-quality and affordable public services for its people, resulting in impressive health and education indicators, with a literacy rate approaching 100% and a life expectancy of over 78 years. Tourism is the main driver of economic growth, fiscal revenues, and foreign exchange earnings for the country. The country ..read more

The judgment handed down by the UK Supreme Court (UKSC) in October 2020 in Enka v Chubb was regarded as a seminal judgment which settled the longstanding issue of what law applies to arbitration agreements where the parties have not made a choice on governing law applicable to the arbitration agreement. Less than a year after that judgment of UKSC, in August 2021, the Maldives Supreme Court (MVSC) delivered its judgment in Sun v Hilton with notably comparable holdings on the issues. In this blog, the author will consider how the judgment of MVSC in Sun v Hilt ..read more

Maldives’ tryst with international investment law is intriguing. Despite its ample reliance on foreign investment, Maldives is neither party to the ICSID Convention nor signatory to any bilateral (BIT) or multilateral investment treaty (MIT). Although it signed its first BIT in 2017, with the UAE, the treaty is not yet in force. Thus, international law has minimal role to perform in the protection of foreign investment in Maldives. This is unsurprising given the legitimacy crisis of the international investment law regime, and its failure to regain the trust of its sovereign sta ..read more

Maldives’ relationship with international trade and investment is as old as its history. Traditionally, Maldives has been dependent on import and export for necessities. For instance, fish and coconut have been Maldives’ traditional exports; whereas, rice, cereals and other foodstuffs have been traditional imports. Post-independence, Maldives looked for newer areas to attract the foreign capital in its market. The Maldives has received the highest foreign investment in the tourism sector and is expected to receive investments in infrastructure projects and the real estate sector ..read more

The Editors of the Cambridge International Law Journal Blog endorses this statement by the Fellows of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law condemning the aggression perpetrated by the Russian Federation against Ukraine. The events of the past month have sharply called our focus back to the acts of aggression taking place around the world. We condemn all abuses of international and humanitarian law and request that readers and contributors join the call by the Department of International and European Law at the National University of Kyi ..read more

Article 29 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) is the only provision in the Convention offering guidance as to which territories of a given State are governed by an international treaty. Its role is confined solely to that function. As far as the provision itself is concerned, it is comprised by two main parts, (i) a general part (“a treaty is binding upon each party in respect of its entire territory”); and (ii) an exception (“unless a different intention appears from the treaty or is otherwise established”).  The provision does not address related matters su ..read more

Introduction  International investment tribunals face various challenges when conceptualising the temporal scope of the various treaties they interpret and apply. A review of case law developed under international investment tribunals evidences that many unsettled questions remain in this regard. This post draws on our recently-published chapter on these topics to examine how international investment tribunals have sought to address aspects of temporality in international investment arbitration. It draws on three different elements of temporality and assesses the singularities o ..read more

Treaty interpretation would be so much easier if we all spoke the same language. According to the Biblical story, once we all did. But divine intervention at the Tower of Babel resulted in the multitude of languages that we speak today. This complicates things considerably, treaty interpretation included. In many instances, members of a delegation negotiating a treaty have no knowledge of the language of the other delegation. An example we like to cite is that of the 2007 Mexico-Slovak Republic bilateral investment treaty. No member of the Slovak delegation negotiating the treaty spoke Sp ..read more

The ICSID Convention and the Vienna Convention live a complicated relationship. The Vienna Convention plays (or is meant to play) a key role in the way the ICSID Convention is construed. To date, no ICSID tribunal has ever denied that the general rule of interpretation embodied in Article 31(1) of the Vienna Convention governs the interpretation of the ICSID Convention. In fact, most ICSID tribunals called to interpret the ICSID Convention have made recourse to the general rule of interpretation on the basis of its customary international law status. However, despite the deference gi ..read more

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) was perhaps the most important product of the International Law Commission’s 75 years of existence to date.  It has been thought finally and definitively to have settled the struggle between Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice and Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, both of them having served as Judges of the International Court of Justice, over how treaties should be interpreted.  Lauterpacht believed that in order properly to interpret the substantive provisions of a treaty one should search for the treaty Parties’ intentions. &nb ..read more