The Energy Charter Treaty is a multilateral teaty providing legal/regulatory framework enabling trade, transit and efficiency in energy products, materials and services. The Energy Charter Treaty envisages energy market restructuring and provides legal safeguards to investment, transit and trade of energy sources including oil, gas, coal, uranium, electricity and renewable energy among the participating states. The importance of ECT increases with the level of export and import dependence of each participating states as is the case of most of Asian countries. Ever increasing membership of ECT indicates its effectiveness for protection of investment and facilitation of trade and transit across borders. In a nutshell,the ECT has developed into an international organization carrying considerable weight in facilitiation of international energy trade and resolution of energy trade disputes.

Mr. Muhammad Arif supervised LLM thesis of Mr. Abdul Basit Qureshi on Energy Charter Treaty. The main author has over 25 years upstream oil industry experience whereas the co-author has 6 years downstream regulations experience. Authors have research interests relating to regualtory reforms, policy formulation and market restructuring.