Originally from Reflections on International Arbitration - Essays in Honour of Professor George Bermann

Preview Page

Arbitration awards under the ICSID Convention should in principle be executed more efficiently than awards governed by other legal regimes.  National courts have no role in reviewing ICSID awards.  The party seeking enforcement presents a certified copy of the award to the competent court in a Contracting State.   The national courts are then obligated to recognize the award and enforce its pecuniary obligations as if it were a final judgment of a court in that State. 

The contemplated procedure is essentially administrative: the certified ICSID award becomes an executable title in the national system upon presentation to the competent court.  The ICSID approach is streamlined compared to that under the New York Convention, which grants courts a gatekeeper role that, while limited in scope, nonetheless requires a substantive decision by the court before the arbitral award can be transformed into an executable title.

And yet the manner in which a number of national courts have implemented the ICSID Convention has been anything but streamlined.  A party in Ioan Micula et al. v. Romania, ICSID Case No. ARB/05/20, applied to a U.S. court for execution of the ICSID award in April 2014.  The court confirmed the award in September 2019 – over five years later.