Message from Martina

As 2025 draws to a close, I want to thank you for an extraordinary year. It has been one of the busiest in ICSID’s 60-year history. Many of you experienced this firsthand: our team supported parties, arbitrators, conciliators, and mediators in 360 cases and contributed to more than 170 training and knowledge-sharing activities. I am deeply proud of how the ICSID team showed up—going the extra mile, day after day—to deliver world-class service. We have grown our staff to meet the increased demand and will continue to do so to ensure we remain responsive and accessible.

A defining feature of this year was our focus on being closer to our users and partners. We took concrete steps to deepen our regional presence, strengthen collaboration across the World Bank Group (WBG), and expand our outreach. Together with our WBG sister organizations, we worked with Member States to build capacity, improve business environments, and help foster cross border investment that supports jobs and growth.

In August, we announced our intent to establish an ICSID Singapore Office—the first staffed office outside Washington, D.C., in our 60-year history. This regional hub will administer ICSID cases, deliver training, and create new opportunities to engage with State officials, practitioners, and partner organizations across Asia and beyond. Building on this momentum, we are working to open additional staffed offices in other regions so that we can be closer to Member States and better support their needs in preventing and resolving investment disputes. Throughout the year, we visited with officials and partners from both Member and non Member States to listen to their priorities and identify opportunities to strengthen our support. We also saw rising interest in mediation and have expanded capacity-building accordingly, including on site workshops, new partnerships, and a dedicated webinar series.

We continued to innovate to make our processes more efficient and accessible. New platforms are streamlining administrative tasks and improving agility across our operations—leading to more effective dispute resolution. We are advancing measures to reduce time and cost, including greater efficiencies at the early stages of cases and new agreements with partners worldwide that offer preferential rates for hearing and meeting facilities.

Transparency and practical insights remain central to our mission. We expanded ICSID’s Caseload Statistics to share more timely data—such as damages claimed and awarded, the geographic origin of investors, and provisions that enhance transparency and procedural fairness, including disclosures of third party funding and decisions on security for costs. And we continued contributing to global conversations on investor-State dispute settlement modernization and reform through panels, presentations, and training.

Looking ahead to 2026, our priorities are clear: uphold the highest standards in case management, keep innovating, and deepen our engagement with Member States, the dispute resolution community, and WBG institutions. We will also broaden our outreach to collaborate with policymakers, organizations, researchers, journalists, and other stakeholders who may be less familiar with the prevention and settlement of international investment disputes.

To our Member States, participants in proceedings, and partners: thank you for your trust and collaboration. And to my ICSID colleagues: I am grateful for your unwavering dedication and team spirit—you make this work possible.

With warmest wishes for the year ahead,

Martina Polasek
Secretary General, ICSID
 

Related: 
Read Martina's July 2025 message: Enhancing Efficiency, Reducing Costs, and Forging Alliances
Read Martina's message 2024 Year in Review