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A Second Forum for Investor-State Disputes?

  • Writer: Aişe Gül Akkoyun
    Aişe Gül Akkoyun
  • Nov 28, 2025
  • 3 min read

Singapore's commercial court turns ten, and starts doing work that looks a lot like arbitration's job.



Background

The Singapore International Commercial Court held a conference marking its tenth anniversary in January 2025, drawing more than 420 delegates from fifteen jurisdictions. A decade in, the court's docket has moved well beyond the general cross-border commercial disputes it was originally designed to hear, into territory that overlaps increasingly with the traditional preserve of investment arbitration.



From alternative to arbitration, to companion of it

The SICC was conceived, in part, as a court-based alternative to arbitration for cross-border commercial disputes — a forum offering international judges, procedural flexibility, and enforceability advantages under the Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements. What the past several years have shown is that its more significant role may not be as an alternative to arbitration at all, but as a venue that increasingly handles the enforcement and setting-aside of investor-state arbitration awards where Singapore is the seat or the award debtor's assets are located.



What's new in 2025–2026

Two developments stand out. The court launched a Digital Economy Specialised List aimed at AI, crypto, and smart-contract disputes, extending its subject-matter reach into an area with obvious overlap to the Law & Technology questions this archive tracks elsewhere. And in November 2025, the Bahrain International Commercial Court was launched with a bilateral framework allowing first-instance decisions there to be appealed to the SICC — an unusual cross-border appellate arrangement for a common-law-style commercial court, and one that extends Singapore's institutional reach well beyond its own jurisdiction.



Why the investor-state overlap matters

Investor-state awards, once rendered, still have to be enforced somewhere, and Singapore's courts have seen a steady rise in matters relating to enforcement and setting-aside of ISDS awards. Commentators tracking the jurisprudence describe it as pushing into harder terrain: the boundaries of state immunity, transnational estoppel, and due process in a sanctions-heavy era. That is a materially different function from hearing the underlying merits dispute, but it is one that determines whether an investor-state award that took years to obtain is actually worth anything.



What would be worth measuring

  • How the volume of ISDS-award enforcement and set-aside applications before the SICC has changed year over year since the court's founding

  • Whether outcomes in these applications differ systematically from equivalent applications in other major enforcement venues (England, Switzerland, the United States)

  • Whether the new Bahrain–SICC appellate pathway generates a measurable flow of cases, or remains largely symbolic

  • Whether the Digital Economy Specialised List produces disputes that meaningfully intersect with existing investment-arbitration subject matter, such as AI-linked infrastructure investment


The open question

If enforcement and set-aside applications are becoming a larger share of what a court like the SICC actually does, then court-based commercial dispute infrastructure and treaty-based arbitration are not fully separate systems competing for the same disputes — they are increasingly sequential stages of the same disputes, with arbitration producing the award and specialised commercial courts determining whether it survives contact with the debtor's assets. Whether that division of labour is efficient, or whether it simply relocates the hardest fights to a second forum, is not yet something the data can answer.



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