I spent yesterday at a Georgetown Law School conference on transparency and international arbitration. Ostensibly focused on arbitration writ large, the event tended to zero in on investor-state arbitration (and investment treaty arbitration more specifically). While various arguments were aired for and against transparency, I was struck (anew) by the extent to which the transparency…
The most commonly used form of construction contract in the Gulf is the FIDIC form. Although the FIDIC forms, for project procurement and consultantcy services, progressed slowly over the years, culminating in the burst of colours in the suite of contracts issued in 1999, some parts of the Middle East still use the 1987 (Red…
The ABA Journal has an interesting article on the Americanization of international arbitration. There’s nothing particularly new to our readers in this article. It’s a theme that my friend and colleague Tom Stipanowich has written about extensively. I’ve written a bit about the subject as well. But the fact that the story is being told…
In 2007, the Russian Supreme Arbitrazh (State Commercial) Court in OAO NK Rosneft v. Yukos Capital S.a.r.l ruled that arbitrators must disclose their connection to the legal counsel of the other party at the time of their appointment. The facts of the case suggested that one of the arbitrators spoke at a conference organized and…
The principle of good faith arises in investment treaty arbitrations in various contexts. Tribunals, of course, regularly refer to Article 31(1) of the Vienna Convention for the rule that treaties shall be interpreted in good faith. Tribunals have noted that states must perform their treaty obligations in good faith. References to good faith occur in…
In the last month, two professors mused to one of the authors that “international investment arbitration is undertheorized”. One of the professors is a serious scholar of international law. The other professor was a former clerk at The Hague and writes about international investment arbitration. Their comment got us thinking: Is international investment arbitration undertheorized?…
Constructively, commercial arbitration is a judicially recognized and an enforced method of dispute resolution in the UAE. Via Article 203 (5) of the Civil Procedure Law (1992), if the parties have agreed to refer a dispute to arbitration, an action on that dispute cannot be brought before the courts. So let us assume for present…
Anti-suit injunctions have certainly received their fair share of air time (and some would say more) as a result of the West Tankers debate – about which this blog entry is not. Now that all eyes are on anti-suit injunctions, it is interesting to keep an eye on how the cases post West Tankers pan…
In Safety National Casualty Corp. v. Certain Underwriters at Lloyd’s, London, 587 F.3d 714 (5th Cir. 2009), the Fifth Circuit addressed the following question: does the McCarran-Ferguson Act authorize state law prohibiting arbitration agreements in insurance contracts to reverse-preempt the New York Convention or the New York Convention’s implementing legislation (the Federal Arbitration Act, or…
In a post last year we considered the English Court of Appeal’s judgment in the case of Dallah Estate and Tourism Holding Company v The Ministry of Religious Affairs, Government of Pakistan [2009] EWCA Civ 755, where the Court of Appeal held that an order giving leave to enforce a French ICC arbitration award was rightly set aside by the High Court as it had been established, pursuant to section 103(2)(b) of the Arbitration Act 1996 (“the Act”), that as a matter of French law the respondent government was not a party to the arbitration agreement. The High Court and Court of Appeal agreed that an application under section 103(2) of the Act required a rehearing of the facts in contention (in Dallah the existence of an arbitration agreement), not just a review of the award.
The United States and Mexico signed the General Claims Convention of September 8, 1923 and thereby constituted the U.S.-Mexico General Claims Commission.* The Commission was asked to resolve all claims by U.S. and Mexican citizens against the other government for loss or damage to their person or property interests arising out of the period of…
On a first reading this might seem like a particularly narrow question. Perhaps geographically of limited utility. But to almost every international organization in the industrial, defence and major projects sectors it is, in fact, one of the burning issues confronting their participation in a market planning to spend or invest $USD450billion in 2010. In…
Dispute resolution clauses often provide for negotiations, conciliation or a similar procedure before arbitration. Both UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration and the Russian law contain no provisions on the legal effect of the pre-arbitration procedure of dispute settlement. In particular, they are silent on whether its non-fulfillment precludes the arbitral tribunal’s competence. Accordingly,…
In this blog I return to the theme of investor misconduct, albeit in a different context from my previous posts: host state criminal investigations during investment treaty arbitration proceedings. This issue has arisen in a number of recent investment treaty arbitrations, most notably in a series of cases against Turkey (Cementownia, Europe Cement and Libananco),…
In its first newsletter of the year 2010, the Swiss Chambers’ Court of Arbitration and Mediation was able to announce a high increase in arbitration cases submitted to the Court under the Swiss Rules of International Arbitration. A total of 104 new arbitration cases was submitted in 2009, an increase of more than fifty percent…
Under the Russian legal system, the last resort a party has with respect to challanging a court decision is to apply to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation with a claim to review the decision’s compliance with the Russian Constitution in terms of the provisions of laws and/or regulations applied by lower courts. There…
I spent some time earlier this month covering the Chevron-Ecuador hearings that took place in the Federal District Court in New York City. Much has been written about the outcome of those proceedings – and the denial of a request by Ecuador for an injunction against a bilateral investment treaty arbitration started some months ago…
Given that the arbitration clause is often relegated to the status of boiler-plate during contractual negotiations, it will come as no surprise that arbitration clauses may be inadequately drafted. While not every clause will be so deficient as to be ‘pathological’, many readers of this blog will have first-hand experience of dealing with the fall-out…
I am grateful to Professor Hess for his comments on my 3 March 2010 blog. It greatly contributes to advancing the debate. However, it also perfectly illustrates the difficulties of a proposition – the total or partial deletion of the arbitration exception in Regulation 44/2001 – that has not been sufficiently thought through. 1. Professor…
En arbitraje, a pesar de la cada vez mayor armonización a nivel internacional, siguen existiendo muchos temas en los que cada jurisdicción aporta un enfoque distinto, normalmente sobre cuestiones que van más allá del mero ámbito del arbitraje y entran de lleno en el ámbito contractual. Es lo que sucede con los acuerdos de sometimiento…
Unlike arbitration which is quite solidly supported by legislation (the law of the Russian Federation “On International Commercial Arbitration”, which is almost completely based on the UNCITRAL Model Law, was adopted in 1993. The Federal Law “On Arbitration Courts” governing domestic arbitration entered into force in 2002), mediation in Russia lacks adequate legal framework. The…
I have always found the submission of expert legal opinions on matters of international law to investment treaty tribunals rather odd. Why are expert opinions needed and what is their status? To begin, the opinion is submitted to an international arbitration tribunal often comprising leading public international lawyers (and sometimes current or former judges of…
We’ve been asked by Kluwer to say a few words about our new book, International Arbitration and Mediation: A Practical Guide. Before explaining what we tried to accomplish, it may be worth noting what we did not set out to do, which was to write a learned treatise about international arbitration (or mediation). For that,…
Several years ago, three United States Courts of Appeal contemporaneously dismissed actions to enforce foreign arbitral awards for lack of personal jurisdiction, a development that provoked expressions of concern from the arbitration bar. Adding to their dread, the United States Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit dismissed an enforcement action on forum non conveniens…
