elham amidimehr

International investment law protects shareholders’ rights through treaty-based arrangements. That is to say, a great number of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) identify shares as one of the types of protected investment as ICSID arbitral tribunals have recognized in several cases. Despite that, it should be considered that these Bilateral Investment Treaties do not, however, define shareholder or share and typically do not state whether shareholders must own a majority of the shares or control a company's administration to qualify for treaty protection. the absence of a general international law definition of shares or shareholders leads to the need to refer to such concepts as they are generally accepted by municipal legal systems and determine shareholders’ rights and obligations by way of renvoi to municipal rules. this process must preserve the integrity of the concept. tribunals and courts cannot modify or deform these concepts. This study examines the manner of interaction between municipal and international law in the field of shareholders' direct and indirect claims.

The attributability of actions to states within the context of investment treaty disputes and to focus on the roles played by international and domestic laws in such attributions have caught the attention of jurists in recent years. The ILC Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, and particularly, article 3 points to the main outcome of this debate, where it does not consider domestic law irrelevant in internationally wrongful acts and stipulates that the issue is subject to international law and it will take into account the relevance of domestic law. Thus, although the characterization of an act of a State as internationally wrongful is an independent function of international law and such characterization is not affected by the characterization of the same act as lawful by domestic law, it does not mean that domestic law is irrelevant to such description; on the contrary, it may be related in various ways. The present article attempts to examine the challenging junction of domestic and international law with regard to the attributability of actions taken within the framework of investment treaties, specifically by state-owned and para-statal entities that exercise elements of state authority.