Originally from Investment Protection and The Energy Charter Treaty

Preview Page

It is an honour and a privilege to have participated in the organisation of this conference, which took place in Washington on 18 May 2007, with many colleagues and friends from ICSID, the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce and elsewhere.

It is equally an honour, albeit an honour fraught with peril, to speak about what lies ahead — about the future of the Energy Charter Treaty.

Predicting the future, although dangerous, has held a constant attraction for human beings. The reasons for this are in some respects obvious. After all, as one Chinese proverb says:

If one could foresee the next three days, one could become rich for several thousand years.

And again:

The person who does not worry about the future will shortly have worries about the present.

On the other hand, a sense of proportion is given by this third and final Chinese proverb:

If you have wine today, get drunk today; worry about tomorrow’s worries tomorrow.

It is to be hoped that the brief glimpse into the future which this chapter attempts to give will not prevent us from doing justice to what has already been achieved, as so many contributors have ably explained, today.

This chapter seeks to cover what lies ahead for the Energy Charter Treaty from three viewpoints.

First, how might the Treaty change or develop, legally speaking?

Second, what new interpretations of the Treaty might be made by arbitral tribunals, and what effect might these have on the Treaty process?

And finally, how will the Treaty as it stands be applied from day to day?