PROCEDURAL MULTIPLICITY AND ENFORCEMENT OF AWARDS IN INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT ARBITRATION: CONTEMPORARY LEGAL CHALLENGES

Abstract

This article examines two closely related structural problems of contemporary international investment arbitration: the multiplicity of procedures available to an investor pursuing claims arising from the same or related investment, and the persistent difficulties encountered in recognising and enforcing the resulting awards. The proliferation of bilateral and multilateral investment treaties, the practice of corporate restructuring for treaty protection, and the expansive interpretation of most-favoured-nation clauses have together allowed related claims to be pursued before several tribunals at once, generating a risk of conflicting decisions and duplicative recovery. The article analyses the doctrinal and institutional tools available to control this multiplicity, including consolidation and coordination under the 2022 ICSID Arbitration Rules, the doctrine of abuse of process, and the jurisdictional case law following Maffezini v. Spain. It then turns to the enforcement stage, contrasting the self-contained regime of Articles 53 to 55 of the ICSID Convention with the more permissive but exception-laden regime of the 1958 New York Convention, and examines the recurrent obstacle of state immunity from execution, illustrated by the protracted Sedelmayer v. Russian Federation litigation. Particular attention is given to Uzbekistan's experience as a respondent state in the Metal-Tech and Oxus Gold arbitrations and to the domestic legal framework governing arbitration and investment protection. The article concludes that procedural multiplicity and enforcement difficulties are two faces of the same structural problem, namely the absence of a centralised and mandatory dispute settlement architecture, and that incremental reforms such as the 2022 ICSID Rules and the UNCITRAL Working Group III process offer only partial solutions.