Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-28
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Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

I move amendment No. 24:
In page 4, between lines 19 and 20, to insert the following:
“(4) The High Court shall have full discretion to refuse leave for
enforcement of an award made pursuant to an international agreement
to which this section applies where such enforcement would run
contrary to an opinion of the International Court of Justice.”.
Amendment No. 24 is an important one but our time is constrained, so I will be very brief. Amendment No. 24 asks that the High Court would have discretion to refuse leave for enforcement of an award where such enforcement would run contrary to an opinion of the International Court of Justice. This is relevant in terms of the occupied territories Bill and the concern expressed relating to the financial impact on companies by taking action and having a full and proper Bill that addresses both goods and services. We are seeing the interests and concerns of companies being quoted very heavily as a rationale in the argument for the dilution of that Bill. This again goes back to it being hard to credit the suggestion that the chill effect would not come in.
If we had a measure such as the occupied territories Bill - which in its preamble states that it relates to ensuring compliance with the opinion of the International Court of Justice - and were a company to take a case to the arbitration body and it went ahead and said here is the company's award, as we know it would because it does not consider itself bound by national and European law or the International Court Justice, would that award be enforced in Ireland?
I suggest that it should not be. If an award is made in relation to a measure that was taken to ensure compliance with the International Court of Justice, then it should not be enforced here.
It is so not credible that the Minister of State is suggesting there will be no impact whatsoever when we see the Government already wobbling on previous commitments on international law, when the international law is crystal clear. As he knows himself, the foreign affairs committee has been clear on that as well, simply because of the concerns of the interests of some companies. Would it not be even more of a constraint on the Government or any future Government when it came to doing what we and the public all know is the right thing, if those companies also had a very useful tool by which they could threaten legal action in the event of the frustration of their expectations?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:01+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-28