I am back from Rome, where I’ve had the opportunity to attend to the seminar “The Taking of Evidence in International Arbitration” organized by the Istituto Superiore Di Studi Sull’ Arbitrato (I.S.S.A.) and ICC-WBO International Court of Arbitration.
The program was very solid and it delivered even more than expected.
All presentations were direct and to the point, but if I had to choose only one, I would say the presentation of Prof. Piero Bernardini summarized very well most of the problems that evidences face in international arbitration.
Being the talks about technical matters, and to my surprise, presentations in Italian were very easy to follow to me. Or maybe I didn’t get it too well, you will know by the following posts in which I will discuss them in detail.
I want to express my congratulations to the organizers and presenters for trying to shed some light in this very important subject.
Why do I think it is that important?
Because there’s a permeability of legal concepts between different legal cultures and this is happening in a very unstructured-uncontrolled way. Different actors in legal systems are more aware of concepts that are alien to them, sometimes because they hear about them and aren’t able to put them into the proper context, sometimes because parties in local conflicts are in fact multinational entities with an own huge inertia when it comes to litigation.
The concepts “expert witness” or “discovery” come to my mind as clear examples.
In the coming years I think that we will see a double effect to that “awareness”: first in the short term, in international arbitration the tendency that procedural rules in general and evidence rules in particular have to converge both “de jure” and “de facto” will grow; second in the long term local legal systems will adapt, adopt and maybe mutate to fit this reality, not without tensions, but I hope that at least this will happen keeping a proper coherence and context.
