• Journal of Legislation Research
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• no.44
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• pp.211-239
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• 2013

In 2012, the Korean government has hosted the AFoCO Secretariat in Seoul. The AFoCO Secretariat is established by Agreement between the Governments of the Member States of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Republic of Korea on Forest Cooperation (AFoCO Agreement) which is initiated by the Korea. The Korea government, however, does not have any laws and regulations to regulate the matter of legal status and legal personality of nationally hosted international organizations including the AFoCO Secretariat. Therefore, the legal status and legal personality of AFoCO Secretariat in international and domestic arena are still not clear. To articulate such issues and to propose some answers, this article analyzes the international and domestic legal theory and practice about the status and legal personality of public international organizations. As a result, it is common in the literature to delimit international organizations by some standards. One characteristic is that international organizations are usually created between states. A second characteristic is that they are established by means of a treaty. And as a third characteristic, international organizations must possess at least one organ which has a will distinct from the will of its members. According to those criteria, the AFoCO Secretariat can be categorized as a public international organization. It means that the AFoCO enjoys certain privileges and immunities as a public international organization and must confer legal capacity in Korea even there is no domestic laws and regulations conferred the status and legal personality to it. It, however, will be a better way to confer domestic legal personality on the AFoCO Secretariat through a domestic act like an "Act on the Assistance of International Organization Attraction". This act will stipulate the legal status of international organization in Korea including the privileges and immunities as well as the matter of assistance of hosting international organizations.

• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.31-52
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• 2019

As international transactions have grown more numerous, situations of disputes related to the transactions are getting more complicated and more diverse. Cost-effective remedies to settle the disputes through traditional methods such as adjudications of a court will be insufficient. There fore, nations are attempting to more efficiently solve investor-state disputes through arbitration under organizations such as the ICSID Convention, the ICSID Additionary Facility Rules, and the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules by including the provisions on investor-state dispute settlement at the conclusion of an investment agreement. In case of an arbitration under the ICSID Convention, ICSID directly exercises the supervisorial function on arbitral proceedings, and there is no room for the intervention of national courts. In time of the arbitration where the ICSID Convention does not apply, however, the courts have to facilitate the arbitral proceedings. When the recognition and enforcement of an arbitral award under the ICSID Convention are guaranteed by the Convention, it should be considered that the New York Convention does not apply to them under the Convention Article 7 (1) fore-end. In exceptional cases in which an arbitral award under the ICSID Convention cannot be recognized or enforced by the Convention, the New York Convention applies to the recognition and enforcement because the award is not a domestic award of the country in which the recognition or enforcement is sought. It is up to an interpretation of the New York Convention whether the New York Convention applies to ISDS arbitral awards not based on the ICSID Convention or not. Although an act of the host country is about sovereign activities, a host country and the country an investor is in concurring to the investment agreement with the ISDS provisions is considered a surrender of sovereignty immunity, and it will not suffice to exclude the investment disputes from the scope of application of the New York Convention. If the party to the investment agreement has declared commercial reservation at its accession into the New York Convention, it should be viewed that the Convention applies to the recognition and enforcement of the ISDS awards to settle the disputes over an investitive act, inasmuch as the act will be considered as a commercial transaction. When the recognition and enforcement of an arbitral award on investment disputes about a nation's sovereign act have been sought in Korea and Korea has been designated the place of the investment agreement arbitration as a third country, it should be reviewed whether the disputes receive arbitrability under the Korean Arbitration Act or not.