Western Europe can be considered the birthplace of the current international investment protection regime. It was originally developed to protect Western European investors and economic interests in non-EU countries. Since the 1990s, however, international investment law and its dispute settlement mechanism of investor-State arbitration have increasingly extended to intra-European investor-State relations, eventually bringing it into conflict with the principles of European Union law. Two landmark decisions of the ECJ have now sealed the fate of intra-EU investor-State arbitration based both on bilateral investment treaties as well as the multilateral Energy Charter Treaty. The article traces this development and analyses the ECJ’s Komstroy judgment in which the Court found intra-EU ECT arbitration to be incompatible with EU law. It then discusses the implications of this jurisprudence for the international investment protection regime within the EU before arguing that domestic courts of the EU member States might emerge as a fully-fledged substitute for arbitral tribunals.

After more than half a decade since their creation, refugee camps on the Aegean islands, and especially Mavrovouni – the successor camp to Moria, the largest refugee camp within the European Union – continue to face massive criticism. Despite substantial funding and the subsiding of refugee flows, the camps continue to suffer from serious structural deficiencies. With the EU Commission’s recent announcement that it intends to maintain refugee camps for the near future, there is growing concern about a permanent space with lower legal standards of protection than anywhere else on European territory. The permanent state of extreme material poverty can no longer be reconciled with basic guarantees from Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Given that, the possibility of a pilot procedure by the European Court of Human Rights, which has received little attention in this context so far, provides an opportunity to restore these guarantees and to link them to the concept of refugee camps in a binding way for the future hotspot approach.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, international law norms on the cross-border spread of disease are under a reformist spotlight. Multiple perspectives have emerged on what the best course of action for better pandemic preparedness is. The legally binding and non-binding instruments from the World Health Organization (WHO) lie at the centre of these reformist debates. Against this backdrop, the current article explores past and current iterations of law-making and reform within the WHO. Currently, a three-pronged legal juncture is in place: creating a new instrument, amending existing rules, or issuing recommendations. The article concludes with a cautionary note regarding the overreliance on legally binding norms as the only worthwhile outcome of pandemic reformism. The prevalent geopolitical setting, always susceptible to major divides, is an inescapable determinant of success.