CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Panchuk, Stanislav |
|---|---|
| Title | Virtual Hearings in International Commercial Arbitration: Is This the New Normal? |
| Summary | Virtual hearings have become a regular practice in international commercial arbitration since the COVID-19 outbreak. Their advantages, ensuring the flexibility of the process and facilitating the expeditious hearing of cases, promise to make them the default option in post-COVID arbitration. However, virtual hearings raise problems of equal treatment of the parties and of the exercise of their right to be heard. These problems have not received duly attention from scholars and practitioners in view of the widespread appreciation of virtual hearings. The very reason for that may be the failure of legal norms to reflect the true nature of virtual hearings and containing the ambiguous concepts of “oral hearing” and “in-person hearing”. Be that as it may, virtual hearings raise insurmountable challenges to the party’s due process guarantees. These include the irreconcilability of time zone differences, limitations on effective remote witness examination, as well as risks to technology operations and data security. Against this backdrop, this thesis argues that virtual hearings violate due process guarantees according to the existing standards in international commercial arbitration. It therefore suggests that virtual hearings should not replace the traditional practice of physical hearings after COVID-19 is over. |
| Supervisor | Soave, Tommaso |
| Department | Legal Studies LLM |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/panchuk_stanislav.pdf |
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