The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) Investment Agreement is the second largest multilateral investment treaty worldwide. Attentions were attracted to this deeply dormant Agreement when the tribunal in Hesham Talaat M. Al-Warraq v. Republic of Indonesia rendered its Award on Jurisdiction in 2012, interpreting the critical Article 17 of the Agreement, holding that it contains binding state consent to investor-state arbitration. The jurisdictional question before the tribunal, which may be at issue in the pending cases or which may very well arise in subsequent cases brought under this Agreement, was twofold: (1) whether investor-state arbitration is contemplated in the OIC Investment Agreement; and (2) whether the consent to arbitration contained in Article 17 is binding. In its jurisdictional analysis, in addition to references to Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), the tribunal resorted to the principles of contemporaneity and evolutionary interpretation to conclude that Article 17 of the OIC Investment Agreement contained binding state consent to investor-state arbitration. This article considers the viability of the reliance on the principles of contemporaneity and evolutionary interpretation in this context. It argues that the tribunal's jurisdictional analysis in this regard lacks adequate precision: none of these principles, it seems, could successfully be employed to show the existence of a binding consent to investor-state arbitration in the OIC Investment Agreement. Nonetheless, relying on a proper textual and contextual analysis, the article concludes that Article 17 of the OIC Investment Agreement does seem to contain a binding consent to investor-state arbitration. This conclusion is in line with the ultimate outcome reached by the Al-Warraq tribunal. Nevertheless, the textual and contextual interpretive approach proposed by this article finds fault with the interpretive exercise by the Al-Warraq tribunal to the extent that the issue of existence of binding consent to arbitration under Article 17 of the OIC Investment Agreement is concerned.
