Judicial Supervision and Support for Arbitration

Just to draw your attention to a recent addition to the Key Information tab on the Homepage: an extract from a paper given by Karen Gough of 39 Essex Street, a Past President of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, which is reproduced with her kind permission. It describes how the court has applied Arbitration Act 1996 provisions in both supervising and supporting civil and commercial arbitrations.

The concluding paragraph of her very informative talk (given in 2006, but which she confirms is still valid today) is:

‘What the drafters of the 1996 Act did therefore was to emphasise at the outset the principles of party autonomy and judicial restraint, so that the Court and those involved in arbitration under the aegis of the Act would be clear that the Court would use its powers in relation to the supervision and support of the arbitral process sparingly and only in essential cases. (See section 1 of the Act, in particular section 1(c) which provides: ‘in matters governed by this Part the court should not intervene except as provided by this Part.”) In the decade since the Arbitration Act 1996 was enacted, the Courts charged with dealing with arbitration applications and appeals have substantially adhered to and reinforced these basic and important principles in their decisions.’