Tomorrow, Professor Franco Ferrari, the Center’s Director, will give a talk on “Bridging the Gap between International Commercial and Investment Arbitration” at a two-day conference to take place at the City University of Hong Kong entitled “Conference on Dispute Resolution in Asia and Beyond: Progress and Trends” (for the full program click here). The presentation by Professor Ferrari will be based on a paper co-authored by Professor Ferrari and Dr. Friedrich Rosenfeld, a Global Adjunct Professor at NYU Law in Paris, a Visiting Professor at the International Hellenic University in Thessaloniki and Lecturer at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, published in the NYU Journal of Law & Business (vol. 12: 295) analyzing the interaction of between the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards of 1958 (New York Convention) and international investment law. The starting point of their analysis are the cases in which the domestic authorities in the country where enforcement of an arbitral award is sought unduly interfere with the enforcement instead of taking the arbitration-friendly stance required by imposed by the New York Convention. In these instances, a success in arbitration proceedings may turn out to be a mere pyrrhic victory. This holds true, in particular, where all of the debtor’s assets are located in one jurisdiction. Here, a contracting state’s compliance deficit with the New York Convention cannot be mitigated by seeking enforcement in a different contracting state. In response to these shortcomings, investors have begun to exploit the linkages between the New York Convention and the regime of international investment law.
