Arbitration Courts

This info should serve merely as a rough assistance find information concerning arbitration, any warranty or guarantee for the correctness of the content of this page content is excluded. Therefore, nobody should misunderstand this info as a secured decisive basis for further activities and should not act without detailed further investigation.

Most likely everybody would like to do business without assistance from the courts, but sometimes it seems that due to disagreements it cannot be avoided. Court cases take long and can become quite expensive. Finally in anyway everybody will try to reach a compromise. In most cases rulings by arbitration courts have been proven better. Due to support by independent experts a ruling binding for both parties will be reached. Experts in this case does not mean lawyers, but experts concerning the pending issue, that means people with expertise on the product or related businesses. They can value the facts presented by both parties and value the matter based on their own experience. The arbitration procedure is much faster and usually handled at lower costs. The court hearings are held excluding the public, which in many cases is another advantage. Basic requirement for a successful story of course is, that the companies of the involved parties are registered in countries, that signed the UN treaty of acceptance and execution of foreign arbitration rulings. Up to now more than 130 countries signed this treaty, on the African continent this includes Algeria, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Cote d´Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mauretania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunesia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Zambia. The updated list of treaty members you can check by following the link to the UNCITRAL website among the external links on the left side.
Among accepted courts of arbitration is for francophone countries in Africa the arbitration court in Paris and for the anglophone Africa the arbitration court in London. Quite famous is also the arbitration court in Geneve. Suitable arbitration clauses to be included in the contract you will find on the corresponding websites.

Updated 8/2003