Austria adopts the UNCITRAL Model Law

Abstract

ON 1 JULY 2006, the new Austrian arbitration law entered into force.1 For the past 109 years, Austrian arbitration law had hardly changed. A few issues were considered to merit amendment,2 but in general the 13 articles of the fourth chapter of the Austrian Civil Procedure Code (CPC) provided a reliable framework for domestic and international arbitration. In 2000, a working group within the Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institut fur Rechtsvorsorge und Urkundenwesen started to look at the feasibility and content of a reform. Given the growing importance of the UNCITRAL Model Law (ML) the working group decided at the start to adopt the ML to the largest extent feasible, taking into account the experience of other Model Law countries, not least Germany, which had adopted the Model Law in 1997. This approach was considered best to enhance Austria's role in arbitration and provide the international arbitration community with an easily recognisable framework. As far as the guiding principles are concerned, the old Austrian principles and those of the ML were not far apart. This means that 109 years of court decisions and scholarly writing will continue to be relevant to a large extent. In addition, as the new Austrian and German arbitration law are very similar, a large part of the German court cases and legal writing are of great assistance for solving issues under Austrian arbitration law. This article does not try to give a complete overview of the new law.3 It assumes a basic familiarity of the reader with the ML and does not include the Austrian rules on court procedures. This article will focus on pointing out differences between the new Austrian arbitration law and the ML.4 The sequence of sections of this article largely follows the sequence of topics of ML to facilitate the comparison. …