Two more EU Member States, Portugal and the Netherlands, are now targeted by infringement complaints concerning their networks of bilateral investment treaties. The complaints are being filed today with the European Commission by two national platforms of civil society organisations: TROCA in Portugal and Handel Anders in the Netherlands. They argue that these treaties are incompatible with European Union law. Together with the complaints filed in mid-December by six organisations, including the Veblen Institute (1), against France, Germany, Sweden and Austria, six Member States are now targeted.

Why these complaints?
These bilateral investment treaties allow foreign investors to claim compensation before private arbitration tribunals, outside national and European courts, when States adopt measures that affect their profits, such as climate or tax policies, or sanctions against Russian oligarchs.
In the Netherlands, the company Petrogas brought a claim in 2025 against tax measures adopted in 2022, based on the Dutch treaty with Oman. The claim targets the temporary solidarity contribution on windfall profits and the temporary increase in extraction royalties for the period 2023-2024. The Dutch government has also revealed that the dispute over the windfall tax was likely to discourage further action in this area in 2026. Shell, for its part, launched arbitration proceedings in December 2025 against the early closure of the Groningen gas field, based on the Energy Charter Treaty.
In addition, 40 proceedings had already been recorded in June 2026 in the context of the European sanctions against Russia, with around USD 63 billion claimed. 88.8% of them target Member States or the European Union itself (2).

Incompatibility of investment agreements with EU law
As in the December complaints, the organisations rely on the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union: first, judgments C-205/06, C-249/06 and C-118/07 (3), which concern the incompatibility of pre-accession treaties with EU law, in particular with the EU’s ability to adopt sanctions; and second, Opinion 1/17 on CETA, which concerns the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism.
« We welcome the filing of these two new infringement complaints, which highlight the obsolete nature of the networks of investment agreements of all Member States. After the cascade of withdrawals from the Energy Charter Treaty (4), it seems difficult to justify maintaining these agreements as they are. In the absence of political will from Member States, it is up to the Commission to demand the termination or renegotiation of these treaties, inherited from another era. » – Mathilde Dupré, co-director of the Veblen Institute

Notes:

(1) About the complaints of December 2025
(2) See the interim assessment published in June 2026
(3) In these judgments, the Court held that Austria, Sweden and Finland had failed to fulfil their obligations by not removing the incompatibilities of their pre-accession treaties.
(4) Sweden officially notified its withdrawal on 6 October, Bulgaria in August, Romania in May and Ireland in April, bringing to 14 the total number of Member States that have already left the ECT. As a reminder, the European Commission sent a letter of formal notice to the 16 Member States that remained parties to the ECT in January 2026. (see the dedicated website)