INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT ARBITRATION – AN OUTLOOK FROM CROATIA

Since Croatia’s establishment as a sovereign country in the early 1990s, foreign investments have been identified as a strategic priority of its economic policy. Croatia seeks to provide a stable legal environment for foreign investors through its domestic rules, EU law or bilateral investment treaties. Providing legal protection in international investment disputes is a challenging task, and requires careful balancing between protecting private investor interests and the public interest in the State of investment. Entrusting this task to ad hoc arbitration tribunals, which adjudicate based on a specific body of investment law, and its open concepts, has been under increasing criticism, leading to a conclusion that the characteristics that distinguish arbitration from court proceedings are, at the same time, its greatest shortcomings. On the trail of this reflection, and following the Achmea case, there is increasing advocacy for establishing a special EU court for international investment disputes. This paper focuses, however, on the investment dispute resolution before ICSID involving Croatia either as the respondent or the home state in the last half decade.