This short article offers some thoughts on the power of the Secretary-General of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) to “screen” requests for arbitration under the ICSID Convention to prevent the institution of proceedings in cases manifestly outside the jurisdiction of ICSID.The article looks at the drafting history of the ICSID Convention in this respect and at the procedure introduced by ICSID in 2006 for the early dismissal by arbitral tribunals of claims manifestly without legal merit.This procedure was meant to complement the Secretary-General’s screening power by providing a mechanism summarily to eliminate claims that were unmeritorious from the substantive viewpoint. In practice, however, the early dismissal procedure has mainly been used to eliminate claims judged to fall manifestly outside the jurisdiction of ICSID – with the key difference that while the Secretary-General’s screening power must be exercised on the basis of information presented only by the requesting party, the expectation is that both parties will make submissions in the early dismissal procedure. The article concludes by touching on actual exercises of the screening power and on developing relationships between it and the early dismissal procedure.