Recognition And Enforcement Of Annulled Arbitral Awards

Arbitration as a way to resolve the disputes between international traders is aresponse to the disadvantages of litigation at the beginning. In the international tradearea, no one could look down such characteristics of arbitration as flexibility,confidentiality, availability and so on. The parties choose arbitration to resolvedisputes not only for the above features and the rights to choose arbitrators andarbitral process but the most important is to avoid the risk that the rights andobligations between the parties are determined by the court of either party’s nationality.However, in practice, a country’s court still retains the supervision of arbitration andits award to some degree. As arbitral award is concerned, the arbitration country hasthe right to annul an award according to its own arbitration law, while a court of thecountry which is sought to recognize and enforce an award also can recognize andenforce the award in accordance with its domestic law or the international treatiesconcluded with other countries or that he joined. Whether an award annulled by theorigin place of arbitration can be enforced in other jurisdictions is the issue concernedby this article. On this topic, scholars have different opinions. This article does notfocus on the views of other scholars which are simply introduced or mentioned in achapter or paragraph.Except the introduction and conclusion, the full text has three chapters. The firstchapter is the overview of the recognition and enforcement of annulled arbitral award.There are three sections in this chapter. The first is to introduce what is the annulledarbitral award. The second, two different kinds of arguments to the issue ofrecognizing and enforcing the annulled arbitral award: to recognize and enforce andnot to recognize and enforce such award. The last section is to describe the currentsituation of our topic. The second chapter is the international and domestic basis forthe topic. The first and second sections are to analyze the1958New York Conventionand the1961the European Convention. New York Convention is considered to be thewide recognition and most successful private international treaty adopted by148countries now. The European Convention is a regional treaty, but ratified by27countries. It is very important. Analyzing the two conventions, we can find that theyboth in some way to provide the basis for the recognition and enforcement of theannulled award. The third section is to introduce the domestic basis. The last chapter is the practice of countries, analyzing the changes of some countries’ position torecognizing and enforcing the annulled award since the court of those countries beganto recognize and enforce an annulled award. This paper focuses on the practice ofFrance and the United States. Other countries are influenced in a large way by the twocountries like Spanish. In some conditions, an annulled arbitral award can berecognized and enforced. There is no need to eliminate this possibility at present andit’s also hard to do so.