The 1965 ICSID Convention is one of the world’s most widely ratified treaties. Accession to it appears to have become one of the first priorities of newly independent States, which seem to regard membership of the ICSID system as a practical necessity if foreign investment is to be attracted. In recent years there has been an increase in recourse to ICSID tribunals—now commonly specified in concession agreements, investment codes and bilateral and multilateral investment treaties as available as of right to foreign investors in dispute with the host State. Since this first volume of ICSID Reports appeared in 1993, for example, cases have been initiated against Albania, Bangladesh, Burundi, Costa Rica, Ghana, Madagascar, Malaysia, St Kitts and Nevis, and Zaire. The awards of ICSID tribunals (on which some very distinguished international lawyers have sat) possess, however, an importance extending far beyond the area of foreign investment. They have dealt with a wide range of procedural and substantive issues of international law, and are both of interest and of importance to scholars and to practitioners before any international tribunals.

This new series of reports is prepared (to declare an interest) under the auspices of my own university’s Research Centre for International Law by Rosemary Rayfuse, who is now teaching in Australia. The first volume sets out the basic ICSID texts—the Convention, the arbitration and conciliation rules, and so on—and an extensive and helpful bibliography. But the bulk of the book is, of course, taken up with the texts of ICSID awards. It is a part of the conventional wisdom that clients favour arbitration because it is confidential. There is no duty, it is often said, to disclose the award to anyone. The problems confronting the editor of a series of reports of ICSID arbitrations are, accordingly, plain. Yet many parties to ICSID proceedings, recognizing the great interest attaching to considered awards by eminent lawyers on points of much practical importance, have been willing to release (in some cases sanitized) texts for publication.

In this volume, the editor has pulled together from various sources, and where necessary translated into English, the awards in the Adriano Gardella, AGIP, Amco Asia, Benvenuti & Bonfant, and Kaiser Bauxite cases. Of these, the first and last have (as far as I am aware) not been published previously. The others have, and the overlap between the coverage of these volumes and that of collections such as the international Law Reports and International Legal Materials is a matter which may concern some budget-conscious academic libraries. Nonetheless, the series will be of considerable assistance to both scholars and practitioners. It is often difficult to track down ICSID awards at all, let alone to reconstitute the history of a case such as Amco Asia, which saw two sets of awards and two sets of annulment proceedings as it wended its decade-long way through the ICSID process. This series will greatly ease that task. Its coverage is unlikely ever to be absolutely complete: for example, the first ICSID award, in Holiday Inns, remains confidential, and that case