The New Swiss Law on International Arbitration

ON 18 December 1987, the Parliament of Switzerland finally adopted, by a nearly unanimous vote 1, a comprehensive ‘Federal Act on Private International Law.’ This statute, whose preparation by a group of experts had started in 1973, contained 200 articles and deals with practically all domains of private international law including (apart from the conflict of laws in the fields of family relations, corporations, contracts, torts, etc.) jurisdiction of Swiss courts, recognition and enforcement of foreign decisions, bankruptcy and arbitration.A Chapter 12 of the Act (Articles 176 to 194) deals, for the first time in Swiss legal history, with ‘international arbitration,’ which is now clearly and officially distinguished from domestic arbitration, in contradistinction to the present regime of the so-called ‘Concordat’ (Intercantonal Convention on Arbitration, 1969, hereinafter ‘CIA’ as per its French acronym).Having regard to the important role traditionally played by Switzerland as a host country to many international arbitrations — be they purely commercial, or inter-State, or between a State or State organisation and a private party – the following general presentation, although limited to essentials for reasons of space, will, it is hoped, be of interest to practitioners in the field of international transactions.In order properly to understand the philosophy and the novelty of this law, as well as the meaning of its principal provisions on arbitration, the reader must bear in mind the main features of the legal regime now obtaining in Switzerland2 and some facts of the legislative history of the new Statute.But a first question should be answered: Why was the need felt to legislate on the subject, less than twenty years after the adoption of the Swiss CIA? The CIA indisputably constituted a major advance at the time, not the least because it suppressed or at least diminished …