Chapter 5 


Arbitral Tribunals Tend to Pay Lip Service to the Chorzów Factory Full Reparation Principle, Disregarding the Context and Full Implication of the Dictum

Diora M. Ziyaeva

I. INTRODUCTION
It would not be an exaggeration to say that international investment arbitration practitioners and scholars have written volumes about the classic public international law case of Factory at Chorzów  (1928) which originated the international law keystone principle of “full reparation.”  According to this principle, the purpose of a remedy is to neutralize the effects of a breach so as to restore the status quo.  Yet while Chorzów Factory represents for some an influential authority and has been repeated and reiterated as conventional wisdom, it nevertheless does not necessarily suggest concrete guidelines or “convene anything meaningful”; the case is widely cited but interpreted with widely varying results.  It has not helped the understanding of Chorzów Factory that much of what arbitral tribunals have written in reliance on it can be as confusing as the original decision.