LISBON ARBITRATION

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.   Technological Wave Around 20 years ago, Richard Susskind predicted that lawyers would regularly use e-mails to communicate with clients [1] . Time proved him right. Thereafter, 10 years ago, the same author predicted that “the foundations of dispute resolution [would] be rocked by a combination of electronic disclosure, e-filing in the courts” [2] . Once again, time proved him right. He now predicts that new technologies are one of the main drivers of a big transformation in the lega...

If one had to name this year’s most groundbreaking decision regarding investment arbitration in Europe that would probably be the Achmea judgment, rendered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on March 6, 2018 [1] . And the year hasn’t even ended… In that judgment, the CJEU ruled that the arbitration clause contained in Article 8 of the bilateral investment treaty entered into by the Netherlands and the former Czechoslovakia in 1991 [2] (‘Netherlands-Slovakia BIT’ ),...

… saved! In a recent decision of 20 February 2018 [1], the Cour de droit civil of the Swiss federal court rejected an important and aggressive annulment request of the arbitral award of 9 March 2017 rendered, in the context of international arbitration, by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), in the case RFC Seraing v. FIFA, CAS 2016/A/4490. The basis for the annulment request was, among others, the lack of independence of the CAS’ arbitrators owing, according to the annulment requ...

1. Due to the fact that the 2011 Portuguese Arbitration Law (2011 PAL) has not provided – contrary to what the 1986 Portuguese Arbitration Law (1986 PAL) had done, in its Article 27(3) – on the manner how to handle, cumulatively, the annulment request of the arbitral award before the State courts and an appeal lodged against it (in cases where the parties had reserved in their arbitration agreement, the latter right of appeal), it is debated among Portuguese legal commentators how the int...