International arbitration in the context of "Investor-state dispute settlement"

The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID; French: Centre international pour le règlement des différends relatifs aux investissements or CIRDI) is an international arbitration institution established in 1966 for legal dispute resolution and conciliation between international investors and States. ICSID is part of and funded by the World Bank Group, headquartered in Washington, D.C., in the United States. It is an autonomous, multilateral specialized institution to encourage international flow of investment and mitigate non-commercial risks by a treaty drafted by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development's executive directors and signed by member countries. As of May 2016, 153 contracting member states agreed to enforce and uphold arbitral awards in accordance with the ICSID Convention.

The centre performs advisory activities and maintains several publications.

The American Society of International Law (ASIL) is a professional association of international lawyers in the United States. The organization was founded in 1906. After the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, some participants felt the need for a society devoted to international law separate from international arbitration. Participants in a meeting held on December 9, 1905, at the residence of Oscar S. Straus agreed to establish the ASIL.

The first annual meeting of the association was in Washington, D.C., on April 19–20, 1907. Elihu Root was the first president of the ASIL, serving in that position until his retirement in 1924. Charles Evans Hughes was president from 1924 to 1929 when he became judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague.

The Treaty of Westminster, concluded between the Lord Protector of the English Commonwealth, Oliver Cromwell, and the States General of the United Netherlands, was signed on 5/15 April 1654. The treaty ended the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). The treaty is otherwise notable because it is one of the first treaties implementing international arbitration as a method of conflict resolution in the early modern era. A secret clause, obliging the States of Holland to enact the Act of Seclusion, played an important part in Dutch internal politics during the First Stadtholderless Period.

The Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, commonly known as the New York Convention, was adopted by a United Nations diplomatic conference on 10 June 1958 and entered into force on 7 June 1959. The Convention requires courts of contracting states to give effect to private agreements to arbitrate and to recognize and enforce arbitration awards made in other contracting states. Widely considered the foundational instrument for international arbitration, it applies to arbitrations that are not considered as domestic awards in the state where recognition and enforcement is sought.

The New York Convention is very successful. Nowadays many countries have adopted arbitration laws based on the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration. This works with the New York Convention so that the provisions on making an enforceable award, or asking a court to set it aside or not enforce it, are the same under the Model Law and the New York Convention. The Model Law does not replace the convention; it works with it. An award made in a country which is not a signatory to the Convention cannot take advantage of the convention to enforce that award in the 169 contracting states unless there is bilateral recognition, whether or not the arbitration was held under the provisions of the UNCITRAL Model Law.

The Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration was founded in 1895 to support the cause of international arbitration, arbitration treaties, and an international court, and to generate public support on behalf of the cause. These meetings, which took place between 1895 and 1916, were instrumental in the creation of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Netherlands.

The first Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration was held in June 1895 at Lake Mohonk in Ulster County in the U.S. state of New York. Fifty individuals selected by Albert K. Smiley, a Quaker and the owner of the Mohonk Mountain House, one of the most prestigious summer resorts of the day, convened at the initial sessions at the resort. The annual conferences soon grew to attract 300 leaders of government, business, religion, the press, and education. It was one of the stops of `Abdu'l-Bahá's journeys to the West. After Albert Smiley's death in December 1912, his place as host of the Conferences was taken by his half-brother, Daniel Smiley. The last conference was held in 1916. Plans for a 1917 conference were made, but it was never held, partly due to World War I.

The Halaib Triangle is an area of land measuring 20,580 square kilometres (7,950 mi) located on the Northeast African coast of the Red Sea. The area, which takes its name from the town of Halaib, is created by the difference in the Egypt–Sudan border between the "political boundary" set in 1899 by the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, which runs along the 22nd parallel north, and the "administrative boundary" set by the British in 1902, which gave administrative responsibility for an area of land north of the line to Sudan, which was an Anglo-Egyptian client at the time. With the independence of Sudan in 1956, both Egypt and Sudan claimed sovereignty over the area. The area has been considered to be a part of the Sudan's Red Sea State, and was included in local elections until the late 1980s. In 1994, the Egyptian military moved to take control of the area as a part of Red Sea Governorate, and Egypt has been actively investing in it since then. Egypt has been recently categorical in rejecting international arbitration or even political negotiations regarding the area.

The description of the area as a "triangle" is a rough approximation. The southern boundary follows latitude 22°, the northeastern consists of the Red Sea coast, and the northwestern is jagged. A smaller area south of latitude 22°, referred to as Bir Tawil, joins the Halaib Triangle at its westernmost point along the latitude line – neither Sudan nor Egypt claims Bir Tawil.