Is Kazakhstan a State Successor to the USSR? A Perspective from Investment Treaty Arbitration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In its decision on jurisdiction, the arbitral tribunal in World Wide Minerals v. Republic of Kazakhstan held that Kazakhstan succeeded to the obligations of the Soviet Union with regards to its 1989 Agreement with Canada on the Promotion and Reciprocal Protection of Investments. The aim of this article is to examine the potential legal reasoning by which the arbitral tribunal reached this conclusion. In order to do so, the rules of State succession, as partly codified in the 1978 Vienna Convention on Succession of States in respect of Treaties, are considered. Taking special note of the particularities of the case of the USSR, the specific circumstances of the dissolution of the Soviet Union are examined. In particular, the question of which (if any) obligations may have fallen upon Kazakhstan as a former Soviet Republic is explored. The article concludes by suggesting which arguments may have been used by each of the parties with regards to State succession during the arbitral proceeding and why the Tribunal may have found the arguments proposed by the Claimant to be more persuasive. As a result of this decision, the door could be opened for investors wishing to benefit from the protections included in bilateral investment treaties from the USSR-era, which had until now remained inactive or whose commitments had been honoured exclusively by the Russian Federation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".