An ad hoc Committee constituted under the ICSID Convention has annulled, in its entirety, the award rendered against the Republic of The Gambia in West African Aquaculture Ltd, Kurt Lennart Hansson and Martje Bolt Hansson v. Republic of The Gambia (ICSID Case No. ARB/18/10), relying exclusively on the tribunal's failure to state reasons. The decision, dated 17 July 2026, is understood to be the first in which an ICSID award has been set aside in full on that ground alone, under Article 52(1)(e) of the ICSID Convention.
The annulment relieves The Gambia of a liability that, with accrued interest, had reached roughly USD 33 million. It also revives a question that has divided ad hoc committees for four decades: how thorough a tribunal's reasoning must be, especially on jurisdiction, before its silence becomes fatal to an award.
The underlying dispute
The claim arose from the seizure of a shrimp farming business in June 2015 by Gambian military units acting on the instructions of then-president Yahya Jammeh. The claimants commenced ICSID arbitration, and the case turned on a single decisive point: whether The Gambia had given the written consent to ICSID arbitration required by Article 25(1) of the ICSID Convention.
On 25 March 2024, a divided tribunal upheld jurisdiction and found that The Gambia had unlawfully expropriated the investment, with one member dissenting. In July 2024, The Gambia applied for annulment on two grounds: that the majority had manifestly exceeded its powers by asserting jurisdiction it lacked and by failing to apply the proper law; and that the award failed to state reasons on five outcome-determinative jurisdictional findings.
The Committee's ruling
The Committee — Dr. Veijo Heiskanen (President), Ms. Erica Stein and Professor Githu Muigai — annulled the award in its entirety on the second ground, finding that the majority had not stated reasons for its decision on jurisdiction, and issued a costs order in The Gambia's favour. The decision itself is not yet public, so the full scope of the Committee's reasoning will only emerge once the text is released.
Failure to state reasons is, on paper, one of the narrowest grounds in Article 52(1). Ad hoc committees have consistently held, from Klöckner v. Cameroon and MINE v. Guinea onward, that the ground concerns the absence or incoherence of reasoning, not the correctness of the outcome. As articulated in Wena Hotels v. Egypt and Vivendi I v. Argentina, the test is whether a reader can follow the tribunal's reasoning from the facts and submissions to its conclusion. Reasons that are contradictory, unintelligible or missing on an outcome-determinative point may justify annulment, but a tribunal need not address every argument.
Why it matters
Two features distinguish this ruling. Committees have historically been more willing to annul discrete parts of an award for lack of reasons than the whole, and full annulment on this ground alone has been rare. Here, the deficiency went to jurisdiction — the tribunal's authority to hear the case at all — rather than to the merits or quantum. Where a finding of jurisdiction is inadequately reasoned, the merits and damages analysis that depend on it fall away with it, which explains why the Committee annulled the award entirely rather than severing the jurisdictional finding.
The decision signals that the duty to give reasons carries particular weight where jurisdiction is contested. For states facing jurisdictional objections, it confirms that an insufficiently reasoned finding on consent to arbitrate can undo an award regardless of how fully the merits were treated. For tribunals, it underscores the stakes of Article 48(3) of the Convention, which already requires an award to state the reasons on which it is based. Whether the ruling becomes an outlier or the start of a stricter line on jurisdictional reasoning will depend on how later committees engage with it once the full text is published.