Unit 7: International Commercial Arbitration
7.1 International Commercial Arbitration
The definition: the parties’ agreement to resolve their cross-border commercial disputes through private adjudication (the arbitrator(s)’s award instead the court’s judgment). The appeal: the neutrality (no home-court advantage); the expertise (the trade-savvy arbitrators); the confidentiality (the commercial privacy); the speed-and-finality (the limited challenge); the enforceability (the New York Convention’s passport — the awards’ near-global reach). The law’s layers: the arbitration agreement’s law; the procedure’s law (the lex arbitri — the seat’s law); the merits’ law; the award’s recognition law.
7.2 Basic Principles and Standards of International Commercial Arbitration
- The party autonomy — the arbitration’s foundation: the agreement’s terms (the seat, the rules, the arbitrators, the language); the autonomy’s limits (the mandatory rules, the public policy).
- The kompetenz-kompetenz — the tribunal’s own-jurisdiction competence (the agreement’s validity challenge decided by the arbitrators themselves — the court’s secondary role).
- The separability — the arbitration clause’s independence from the main contract (the contract’s invalidity not automatically the clause’s).
- The due process — the fair-hearing standards (the equality, the opportunity-to-be-heard — the due-process paradox’s lore).
- The minimal-court-intervention — the support-not-supervise philosophy (the assistance-and-the-narrow-grounds-only).
- The confidentiality-and-the-award’s finality — the institutional standards (the UNCITRAL’s framework: the Model Law’s 1985/2006 face — the world’s template; the institutional rules: the ICC-LCIA-SIAC’s world).
7.3 Supervisory Jurisdiction over Arbitral Proceeding
The court’s support-and-control roles: the support — the interim measures (the evidence-and-assets’ preservation); the arbitrator’s appointment (the default mechanism); the assistance in the taking of evidence; the control — the jurisdiction’s review (the kompetenz’s limits — the courts’ prima facie check); the procedure’s serious-irregularity supervision; the public-policy’s watch (the mandatory norms’ respect — the arbitrability’s limits: the criminal-and-family-and-insolvency faces).
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