ABSTRACT
The recent financial crises and the need to maintain liquidity have seen increasing numbers of claimants in investor-state arbitration monetizing their claims. In the past, the scope of monetization of arbitral claims was generally limited to debt restructuring or the financing of the arbitration/enforcement proceedings. However, recent trends suggest that an arbitral award can be monetized in other, more varied ways than these traditional methods. This chapter focuses on one such aspect: the assignment of investor-state arbitration claims and awards, and the enforcement issues emanating therefrom. Section 1 provides an introduction to the issue, distinguishing the assignment of investment arbitration claims and awards from other prevalent forms of monetisation and elaborating on the practice of assignment in the context of investment arbitration. Section 2 briefly summarises the existing investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) legal framework in relation to the assignment of arbitral claims and awards. In Section 3, the authors extensively review several related case law in order to identify common elements of a valid assignment that are widely upheld by ISDS tribunals. Section 4 thereafter evaluates the structure of assignments observed for investment arbitration claims and awards to determine whether the structuring of the assignment affects the final decision of the ISDS tribunal. Finally, Section 5 focuses on the enforcement-related issues arising from the assignment of assigned awards, especially any public policy concerns that may occur.
