Recognition and Enforcement of Investment Arbitral Awards under International Economic Sanctions

作者：Y S Zhang · 发表于：California Digital Library · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.48321/d12fad9183 · 研究领域：International Arbitration and Investment Law、Economic Sanctions and International Relations、Corporate Law and Human Rights

The large-scale expansion of international economic sanctions, most visibly the comprehensive measures adopted by the European Union and the United States against Russia since 2014, has introduced a form of external legal intervention that the drafters of the ICSID Convention and the New York Convention did not anticipate. When a sanctioned State or State-owned entity appears as the award debtor, asset freezes, financial restrictions, and the criminalisation of sanctions violations may render the act of enforcement itself unlawful, or in practice impossible. This creates a normative conflict that existing scholarship has not yet systematically theorised: treaty law requires the award to be enforced, while domestic sanctions law prohibits its enforcement. This thesis addresses a central question: in what sense, and through what mechanisms, do international economic sanctions structurally affect the recognition and enforcement of investment arbitral awards? A subsidiary question follows: can the existing enforcement framework absorb the systemic disruption caused by sanctions, or have its design assumptions ceased to fit the contemporary international legal environment? The central argument is that the impact of sanctions is structural in nature. Sanctions unsettle three institutional assumptions on which the enforcement system has long depended: the assumption of legality in the enforcement environment, the assumption of neutrality in the adjudication and execution of awards, ...