Requirements for the Enforceability of Arbitral Awards: A Comparative Overview

Abstract

Despite the significant efforts undertaken over the past century to unify, or at least harmonize, the law on international arbitration, a uniform set of rules governing the requirements for the enforceability of arbitral awards is still non-existent. In fact, those requirements vary considerably between countries; and to a large extent this is owing to the different approaches in respect of arbitration that prevail in those countries. One may, of course, identify a trend, which globalization and the advent of the information society have largely promoted, to move away from the strict territorialism that still prevailed in this legal domain into the mid-20th Century. But we are still far from the universal recognition of a single, transnational legal order governing arbitration in general and the enforcement of foreign arbitral awards in particular. The differences revealed by legal comparison in this field are not of a purely technical nature, but rather, as this paper seeks to demonstrate, the result of deeply-rooted divergences in respect of the sources of arbitrators’ adjudicatory powers and of the extent to which national courts should give effect to their awards.A pluralism of legal systems is thus, to a large extent, inevitable in the field of international arbitration.