ABSTRACT
The impact of European Union (EU) law over investment treaty obligations represents a relatively new topic in international legal scholarship. The academic input on this issue started to develop mainly in the aftermath of the first known investment treaty dispute challenging the validity of the investor-state arbitration clause in an intra-EU Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT), for reasons related to a member state's (MS) accession to the EU. The investment arbitration practice in the twenty first century were, consequently, dominated by polemics on alleged conflicts between EU law and International Investment Agreements (IIAs). The chapter proposes a framework for solving the conflicts based on a comparative law approach. It identifies the relevant 'tertium comparationis' in the field of fundamental human rights, as represented by the legal framework of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
