The Energy Charter Treaty has come of age, with almost 50 States parties and a small but growing body of arbitral case law. In this new study of the Treaty's investment protection provisions, Thomas Roe and Matthew Happold set out to identify and explain the Treaty's principal provisions and to suggest answers to some of the difficult problems thrown up by its drafting. They discuss in detail questions such as the standards of protection granted by the Treaty and the international responsibility of States for breaches of the Treaty, the various procedures available for the vindication of rights under the Treaty and the conditions to be satisfied before a claimant's complaint may be considered on the merits. Specific issues addressed include the impact of EU law on claims under the Treaty and the Treaty's provisions concerning taxation.

This is a book which comprises articles or essays written as chapters following collaboration by members of the International Law and Religion working group set up at the Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University in Helsinki. The working group held meetings in Helsinki and Rome, together with various seminars. The authors are variously professors, associate professors, senior lecturers, tutors, research fellows and doctoral candidates. Given this background, the chapters are academic in nature, but all are well written and thought-provoking. After a chapter under the heading of a 'Preliminary study', the essays are collected into four main parts: 'Natural law and ius gentium'; 'Human rights, between history, the international and religion'; 'International law, religion and territory in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean'; and 'Political theology and international legal theory'. The fact that there are a series of chapters written as separate essays or articles made it difficult to read the book as one whole, and it seems to me to be a book best read in parts. This was because it was very difficult to identify any one overarching theme, although the fundamental link between all the chapters was that they explored the relationship between religion (principally Jewish, Christian or Islamic) on the one hand and international law on the other. The lack of a single theme makes it difficult in some respects to write a sensible review of the book, because the chapters ranged very widely in subject matter and reflected the different styles and interests of the authors. The excellence of the individual chapters, however, makes up for that fact that there is no such theme throughout the book. The chapters are full of information which might be familiar both to those steeped in the history of international law and to theologians, but the range of information means that there must be very few people who would not learn something new and worthwhile from this book. Information ranges from the influence of Augustine on the Salamanca School's role in establishing modern international legal norms (in 'Religion, empire, and law among nations in the City of God', Chapter 3) to the role of waqf (in particular 'From imperial to dissident approaches to territory in Islamic international law', Chapter 11, p 250). Across all the chapters the information and points made were clearly expressed.

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