University of Silesia in Katowice

Account of the scientific internship at the University of Münster

I have nearly 30 years of history with Münster. In 1990, as a student of the IV Liceum Ogólnokształcące (secondary school) in Katowice, I was one of the initiators of the cooperation and exchange with the local Schiller Gymnasium. That was the first time when I visited this stunning and historic city, famous around the world due to one of the most crucial treaties in the history of Europe, i.e. the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

I was able to realise the three-month scientific internship at the University of Münster (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster – WWU) in 2018 thanks to the University of Silesia’s “Staff Mobility” project and Schumann Fellowship WWU. The internship covered research on constitutional and European grounds for investment and commercial arbitration, issues related to the autonomy of European law, the role of the Court of Justice of the European Union judicial decisions regarding the stand of the investment arbitration, the issues of the governing law in the international investment arbitration, the issues related to substantive law, and attempts to create uniform standards for indemnity in private and public European law.

Within the internship framework, in the presence of local professors, PhD students, students, and foreign guests, I delivered a lecture about the analysis of the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 6 March 2018 regarding the Slowakische Republik v Achmea BV – Case C-284-16, which was groundbreaking in many respects, as it determined the fate of the Bilateral Investment Treaties (BIT) between the members of the EU.

The result of the research carried out at that time are publications published in respected European scientific journals, including the paper Investitionsstreitigkeiten zwischen Deutschland und Polen aus der europäischen Perspektive: Anmerkung zum Achmea-Urteil und seinen Folgen, published in Zeitschrift für Europäisches Privatrecht (2019, no 3, pp. 535–553).

In 2018, the result of the research was a submission of an application for funding a research project Kierunki rozwoju rozstrzygania sporów inwestycyjnych w obliczu kryzysu arbitrażu inwestycyjnego under the OPUS call for proposals of the National Science Centre, which qualified for the second stage of the call for proposals.

The scientific internship in Westphalia was for me an opportunity to contribute to deepen and broaden the good scientific relationship, which was built over the years, between the employees of the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Silesia and the scholars of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The scientific internship in Münster has posed an important stage of my scientific work and resulted in the promotion of the University of Silesia in Europe and across the world; it has proven that Polish scientists actively participate in the discourse regarding the issues of European and international law in the field of settling legal disputes.