ICSID, Jurisdictional Basis, and Its Arbitral Perspectives: The Arbitral Tales of Umbrella Clause and Its Future

The development of international investment law in the last 50 years changed the paradigm of the standing before international law that individual investors have the right to directly institute investment claims even without having any contractual relationship with the host state. This non-privity nature of arbitration is more developed through a jurisprudence of arbitration tribunal adjudications. In this regard, the role played by ICSID is very pivotal. Among the jurisdictional basis of ICSID tribunals, the umbrella clause is one of the common bases of jurisdiction that frequently existed in the majority of Bilateral Investment Disputes. But, the heyday of this century seems not a time of both ICSID as well as umbrella clauses after 50 years' ups and downs of the development of international investment law. Two situations can be easily grasped. On the one hand, ICSID has now faced different critiques, such as lack of consistency of decisions and predictability, and on the other hand, the prominent umbrella clause also faced such inconsistency of application and interpretation before ICSID tribunals. The way outs employed by the stakeholders seems that reforming ICSID, and retreating from adopting the umbrella clause in BITS. Therefore, the paper argued that a centric approach should be adopted to heal out of the ill syndrome of the international investment legal regime and adjudicatio