News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Thursday, May 19, 2022
Observers of the ongoing Energy Charter Treaty modernisation negotiations tend to concur: the process is dominated by the European Union and its desire to have an overhauled treaty by mid 2022. After twelve rounds of negotiations among the more than fifty members of the ECT, the contours of a potential …
European Commission vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis was called to speak in today’s plenary session in parliament to update MEPs on the state of play in ongoing talks to ‘modernise’ the Energy Charter Treaty.
The outcome of the latest round of negotiations towards the modernisation of the Energy Charter Treaty reveals that there will be sufficient flexibility to allow natural gas to remain in place for the coming years as an energy source in Europe.
That was a big week in EU policy. There was an intense European Parliament plenary session during which legislation that will affect trade policy and transatlantic or EU China relations, namely the Digital Markets and Digital Services act as well as the International Procurement Instrument. But there have been other …
The European Court of Justice declared in a judgment on Thursday (2 September) that the investor-state arbitration system under the Energy Charter Treaty is not applicable within the European Union. This effectively puts an end to ECT arbitration within the EU and will significantly increase the pressure on the ongoing …
The European Commission is seeking to convince sceptics on both sides of the debate on the future of the Energy Charter Treaty that negotiations to ‘modernise’ the body of rules that underpin it are making progress. And it seems that the negotiation process launched in 2020 is indeed gradually moving …
The European Union and Japan held a bilateral summit on Thursday (27 May 2021), which ostensibly aimed to give new impetus to an already rich and diverse economic and political relationship.
The Energy Charter Treaty needs to make a success of its ongoing modernisation process in the coming five years, writes Urban Rusnák.
As widely anticipated, the European Union extended on Thursday its export authorisation scheme for COVID-19 vaccines produced by firms with a procurement contract from the EU until the end of June 2021. The move comes amidst controversies over who among the continental EU and the ‘Anglos’ are greater vaccine nationalists. …
The European Court of Justice’s Advocate General Szpunar opined that the investor-state arbitration system under the Energy Charter Treaty is not applicable within the European Union. This will further increase the pressure on the ongoing ECT modernisation process and might very well herald the end of the ECT within the EU.
