LISBON ARBITRATION

[1] As is generally known, by the Achmea decision dated 6 March 2018, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decided that the arbitration clause included in the Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) entered into between the Netherlands and the former Czechoslovakia in 1991 (Netherlands-SlovakiaBIT) is incompatible with European Union (EU) law. However, as it is also known, the relevance of this case goes well beyond its facts and the amounts in dispute. What were the practical...

The current pandemic, caused by SARS CoV-2 and COVID-19 (“ COVID-19 pandemic ” or “ pandemic ”), has had, and will likely continue to have, in the coming months, a very significant impact on several social and economic sectors, in particular, on the justice sector and on the activity of state courts and individuals that provide services in this sector, including lawyers, judges and arbitrators, as well as other entities, such as arbitral institutions. As regards arbitration in particu...

On 5 November 2019, the Macau Official Gazette announced the publication of Law no. 19/2019, the new arbitration law of the Macau SAR (“New Arbitration Law”). This legislation will come into force on 4 May 2020. The full text of the legislation can be found here . The New Arbitration Law replaces the current regime set out more than 20 years ago and introduces important amendments to the arbitration legal framework of Macau. The key changes in the New Arbitration Law include: 1. One sin...

It is widely accepted in the international arbitration community that arbitral tribunals may draw adverse inferences from a party’s failure to produce a document requested in the proceedings. As an example of that, the IBA Rules on the Taking of Evidence in International Arbitration (“IBA Rules”) specifically recognize this possibility in Article 9.5. In this context, an adverse inference can be described as the presumption that an unproduced document is unfavourable to the interests of the p...

1.    Not rarely, in legal commentary dedicated to arbitration law (and, under its influence, in some courts’ decisions) one comes across the proposition that the court before which an arbitral award was challenged is “prohibited from examining the merits of the decision rendered by the arbitral tribunal”. In this article, we intend to show that this proposition is more mythological than real and cannot be accepted, if understood in accordance with the literal meaning of the words forming ...