Professor Eyal Benvenisti, University of Cambridge, delivers the keynote address of the 2022 London Summer Arbitration School, titled “Arbitrating the Laws of War”.
Increasingly, the most sophisticated legal tools designed in the post-Cold War era to deepen global economic integration, by removing barriers to trade and protecting foreign investments, are called upon to address warfare and its consequences. In this quest, these more recent sets of norms meet much older rules embedded in the laws of war, which regulate ‘trading with the enemy’ and the protection of private property during warfare and occupation.
Those older rules reflect an anti-globalist perspective imbued with suspicion toward foreign actors, as they regard the ‘citizen or native of a hostile country [as] an enemy’. The challenge of reconciling these two diametrically opposed legal viewpoints is immense. The lecture offers an overview of the various questions that arise when these two legal regimes clash and offer thoughts about possible responses to them.
Professor Benvenisti talks about different scenarios in the context of armed conflict and protection of foreign investors, including in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the applicability of bilateral investment treaties, occupation, determination of the notion of protected investment, effective control, territorial and jurisdictional issues.
Professor Eyal Benvenisti is the Whewell Professor of International law and the Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. He was Anny and Paul Yanowicz Professor of Human Rights, Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law (from 2002) and Hersch Lauterpacht Professor of Law at the Hebrew University (from 1990). He was Global Professor of Law at New York University School of Law (since 2003). He was Visiting Professor at Yale, Harvard, Toronto, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and gave a special course at The Hague Academy of International Law (2013). Eyal’s areas of research and teaching are international law, constitutional law and administrative law. He was Project Director for the ‘GlobalTrust – Sovereigns as Trustees of Humanity’ research project, funded by an ERC Advanced Grant (2013-2018).
The keynote address was delivered in the London office of Arnold & Porter on 23 June 2022.
