Originally from World Arbitration And Mediation Review (WAMR)

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I. INTRODUCTION
When Argentina moved to restructure its sovereign debt, it
triggered a flood of claims by foreign investors that risked
overwhelming the International Centre for Settlement of
Investment Disputes (ICSID), which hosts the arbitrations.1 The
Argentine crisis continues to make demands on the legal and
institutional structure provided by the investment treaty regime
and ICSID, raising concerns that they are neither robust nor
flexible enough to survive. The premise of this paper is that the
pressure of thousands of claims stemming from the same event
can drive institutional evolution and growth rather than weaken
and erode, and that the Argentina arbitrations at ICSID and the
United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) provide a
useful comparative case study in responding to mass claims with
flexibility and inventiveness.
The UNCC, an ad hoc claims body established by the UN
Security Council,2 faced the challenge of processing a very large
number of compensation claims against Iraq in the wake of its
1990-91 invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing first Gulf War. It
completed this work between 1991 and 2005. Most of the claims