Some Developments at the Thirty-Fourth Session of the UNCITRAL Working Group II(Arbitration and Conciliation)

UNCITRAL 제2 실무작업반의 제34차 회의 동향

The thirty-fourth session of UNCITRAL Working Group on Arbitration was held in New York. Among the topics discussed at the session, many delegations agreed to reform the article 7 of the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration in light of the development of electronic commerce. As for the article 2(2) of the New York Convention, it was agreed to reflect the changes of the article 7 not in the form of a treaty amendment but in the form of an interpretative statement. The topic as to provisional measures has been found so difficult to reach an agreement that most of its texts submitted by the secretariat were left untouched for the lack of time. However, most provisions of the legislative texts on conciliation were dealt with by delegations. The next session is to be held in Vienna. While the Korean Arbitration Act of 1966 was fully amended in 1999, it seems interesting to look at the development in which the arbitration community of the world has already begun discussing the new dimension of the law and practice of international commercial arbitration. It may be considered early to start a new project of reforming the Korean Arbitration Act at this time when only three years passed after it was fully amended. It is, however, worthwhile to remember that some progressive efforts were aborted in amending the Arbitration Act of 1966. One of them is about the same issue on the insertion of some provisions on the enforcement of interim measures of protection to which the priority is given by the Working Group. It seems fair to say that it would not be dangerous to follow the developments and to adapt ourselves to such trends shown in the session. In Korea, the words “arbitration” and “conciliation” are misleadingly interchanged although these two words should be differentiated from each other in the sense of third-party binding decision. It is self-evident from the Korean Arbitration Act and judicial decisions that arbitral awards bind the disputing parties and are to be treated as final judgements by the competent courts. It is, however, not uncommon to find that the word “arbitration” is misinterpreted as having the same meaning of the word “conciliation”. One of the reasons for the confusion is that many legislations in Korea provide for conciliation as having the meaning of arbitration and vice versa. It may be probable that the proposed legislative texts on conciliation could be a kind of useful method to prevent such confusion from being uncontrollable. It is, therefore, necessary that the legislative texts should be introduced into Korea as a legislation on conciliation.