The 2024 Guillermo Aguilar-Alvarez Memorial Prize of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration was awarded to Bálint Kovács, researcher at the Ferenc Mádl Institute of Comparative Law.
The world’s leading organisation for international arbitration and alternative dispute resolution awards the Memorial Prize every two years to the person under 40 years of age who has written the best published paper on international arbitration, conciliation or other forms of dispute resolution in the previous two years.
The winning paper examines developments in investment arbitration in the European Union, with a particular focus on the challenges of enforcement. The study was prepared as part of a project born out of the cooperation between the Ferenc Mádl Institute of Comparative Law, the Eötvös József Research Centre of the National University of Public Service, and the Central European Association of Comparative Law, in the framework of the Future of Europe Conference. Within the project, several research papers were published concerning the relationship between the European Union and international investment law and arbitration. The studies were published in the first issue of the Central European Journal of Comparative Law for the year 2022 a journal of the Ferenc Mádl Institute. The researchers participating in the project presented their papers in an online conference organised in January 2022.
The award ceremony took place at the opening session of the biennial congress of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration in Hong Kong on 6 May.
This is the second time that the Memorial Prize has been awarded thus far, the first prize having been awarded in 2022 to Julian Arato, Professor at the Michigan Law School.
Video of the awards ceremony: