Emergency Relief in International Arbitration: Concept, Legal Framework, Standards, and Enforcement

In an emergency, every second counts. Because the formation of the arbitral tribunal can take weeks if not months to complete, parties are keen to apply for urgent interim measures before a court. With an emergency arbitrator, an application for interim measures can be made and heard quickly without recourse to the courts. An emergency decision typically can be reached within days, allowing a party to avoid any risk of exposing the underlying dispute to the public, which could have negative effects.

Emergency Relief in International Arbitration: Concept, Legal Framework, Standards, and Enforcement discusses key aspects of the emergency arbitrator procedure, It primarily aims to assist applicants and respondents with the emergency relief application so they may navigate successfully through the emergency arbitrator procedure, which is often challenging given the urgent circumstances. The work:

• ascertains what the applicable legal framework is throughout the process that begins with the emergency relief application, how emergency proceedings are conducted, how these may be followed by a tribunal’s review of the emergency decision, and how this review could result, as the case may be, in the enforcement of emergency proceedings
• discusses the requirements and the grounds on which one might resist a request for emergency relief
• considers the grounds for challenging an emergency decision and the tribunal’s powers in this respect
• analyses the binding effect of emergency decisions and their enforcement, as well as the grounds for review and for opposing the enforcement of an emergency decision
• brings to light the efficacy of emergency proceedings, the role of emergency arbitrators, and the weaknesses and strengths of this apparent intervention in the arbitral process

The book specifically seeks to address what is novel about the concept of the emergency arbitrator, keeping in mind the issues that respondents to the emergency relief application, emergency arbitrators, members of arbitral tribunals, the judiciary and legislators may face. Where relevant, the concept of the emergency arbitrator is compared with the procedure that an arbitral tribunal would use to grant urgent interim measures, as it serves as a reference for determining what, if anything, in the concept of the emergency arbitrator is different from interim measures, and therefore makes it a worthy tool meriting closer analysis.

Towards that end, the arbitration rules of the leading arbitral institutions that include an emergency arbitrator procedure, such as those of the ICDR, the LCIA, the ICC, the SCC, SIAC, the HKIAC and others are analysed, as well as the relevant legal instruments and case law from Austria, the British Virgin Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, the UK, Ukraine, and the US. The book also studies the UNCITRAL Model Law.