On March 29, Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a decision in Blasket Renewable Investments v. Kingdom of Spain granting Spain’s motion to dismiss an application to confirm an arbitral award issued under the Energy Charter Treaty.  Leon found that the court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act because Spain’s standing offer to arbitrate in the ECT was void in light of the decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union in the Achmea line of cases. In those cases, the CJEU found that European Union law prohibits member states from entering into arbitration agreements with investors from other EU member states, suggesting that such agreements are legally invalid.

The Blasket decision comes a little more than a month after D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s  decision in NextEra Energy Global Holdings v. Kingdom of Spain, which—as we commented in our March 7 op-ed in this publication—rejected Spain’s motion to dismiss a petition to enforce an ECT award on the very same grounds.