The Arbitral Award: Some Comments on the 1999 Swedish Arbitration Act

Abstract

THE PURPOSE of the following article is to compare the relevant sections of the new 1999 Swedish Arbitration Act with the corresponding provisions of the 1993 Law on International Commercial Arbitration of the Russian Federation. This exercise will go beyond a comparison between the two national legal systems. The Russian Law, in that part which determines the rules with respect to arbitral awards, closely complies with the rules of the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration. Both the Russian and Swedish Acts are very similar in this respect, since both are ‘close relatives’, although to a different extent, of the UNCITRAL Model Law. There is, in addition, a specific reason why regulation of international commercial arbitration in the Russian Federation has considerable practical significance in the context of the Swedish legislation on arbitration. For many years Stockholm has been accepted by Russian (formerly Soviet) parties as the most preferred ‘third country’ place of arbitration, and this tendency will no doubt continue in the future. In the last decade, Swedish arbitral awards have been the subject matter of enforcement proceedings in the Russian Federation much more often than arbitral awards coming from any other country. Among these awards were both institutional awards (mainly awards rendered under the rules of the Arbitration Institution of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce (SCC)) and also awards produced by ad hoc arbitration tribunals taking place in Sweden. Russian law has followed in this respect the more widely accepted, and what might be called more conservative, approach as compared with Swedish law. Russian Law directly provides that the arbitral tribunal decides the dispute in accordance with such rules of law as are chosen by the parties to be applicable to the substance of the dispute (article 28(1)). In the absence of such agreement between the parties …