Lex petrolea as an autonomous legal regime of international law

Abstract

The specific branch lex petrolea evolved from the national and international doctrine, national laws governing the energy sector, oil contracts, case law, and the practice of entities operating in the oil industry. Both, the internationalisation processes and the solutions to particular problems in this sector, are very similar worldwide and tend to follow the international rather than national trend. The world doctrine, however, is struggling with a lack of universal agreement on the recognition or non-recognition of lex petrolea as a separate legal regime. The aim of this article is to organise knowledge in this field by analysing the output of the doctrine of international law, contracts to perform actions in the petroleum sector, of relevant decisions of arbitration courts and practices of actors involved. After determining the essence of lex petrolea and its normative shape, the results of the analysis were compared with the assumptions made in the Report of the Working Group of the International Law Commission which proposed criteria for the recognition of a group of norms from a specific substantive scope as a self-contained regime and its application as a lex specialis. Thus the hypothesis that lex petrolea is a self-contained regime has been confirmed.