CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Yahya, Sitelbenat Hassen |
|---|---|
| Title | Challenging Party-Appointed Experts in International Commercial Arbitration based on Independence and Impartiality Requirements |
| Summary | Nowadays, the use of party-appointed experts has become a growing trend in international commercial arbitration. With the increase in need and purpose of their involvement in arbitration procedures, party-appointed experts are expected to meet various professional requirements and obligations. The need to bring fairness in the arbitral proceedings especially requires experts to be independent and impartial. Moreover, since party-appointed experts are chosen by the parties, involved in various arbitral proceedings repeatedly, and has some sort of professional and personal relationships with parties and members of the tribunal, it is possible to doubt their independence and impartiality. Hence, the main thrust of this paper is to explore the ethical requirements that need to be met by a party-appointed expert in general and the specific standards of independence and impartiality that can be used by arbitrators to determine the independence and impartiality of party-appointed experts. This being the aim, it also investigates whether noncompliance with such ethical requirements will cause their challenge and whether a tribunal has the power to decide upon such a challenge. In doing so, the paper finds out that the duty of independence and impartiality of party-appointed experts has not been expressly stipulated in the binding laws of international arbitration. However, such an obligation can be inferred from the non-binding rules as well as the fundamental principles of international arbitration. It also finds that there are no specific standards of independence and impartiality of party-appointed experts. Based on the analyses of relevant literature and different case law, the researcher argued that tribunals have the power to decide upon a challenge and exclude them based on lack of independence and impartiality. However, such a possibility is being challenged due to the non-existence of specific standards that could help tribunals to use to assess the independence and impartiality of party-appointed experts. For this reason, tribunals are not excluding party-appointed experts despite the existence of some circumstances that create doubt on their impartiality. Therefore, this gap needs a thought from the eyes of the laws. Consequently, the paper acknowledges the need for a specific guideline on the standards of independence and impartiality and recommends for the analogous application of IBA guidelines on conflict of interest in international arbitration for a party-appointed expert. In doing so, the paper emphasizes giving proper consideration of the differences. |
| Supervisor | Professor Markus Petsche |
| Department | Legal Studies LLM |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/yahya_sitelbenat.pdf |
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