International arbitration

International arbitration is arbitration between companies or individuals in different states, usually by including a provision for future disputes in a contract.

The predominant system of rules is the United Nations Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards of 1958 (the "New York Convention"). The International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) also handles arbitration, but it is particularly focused on investor-state dispute settlement and hears relatively few cases.

The New York Convention was drafted under the auspices of the United Nations and has been ratified by more than 140 countries, including most major countries involved in significant international trade and economic transactions. The New York Convention requires the states that have ratified it to recognize and enforce international arbitration agreements and foreign arbitral awards issued in other contracting states, subject to certain limited exceptions. These provisions of the New York Convention, together with the large number of contracting states, have created an international legal regime that significantly favors the enforcement of international arbitration agreements and awards. It was preceded by the 1927 Convention on the Execution of Foreign Arbitral Awards in Geneva.

International arbitration allows the parties to avoid local court procedures. International arbitration has different rules than domestic arbitration, and has its own non-country-specific standards of ethical conduct.

The process may be more limited than typical litigation and forms a hybrid between the common law and civil law legal systems. For example, the International Bar Association (IBA)'s Rules on the Taking of Evidence in International Commercial Arbitration, revised in 2010, do not adopt common law broad disclosure procedures (discovery) or follow the civil law in eliminating entirely the ability of engaging in some disclosure-related practices. The IBA Rules blend common and civil systems so that parties may narrowly tailor disclosure to the agreement's particular subject matter.

David Rivkin, who chaired the committee that drafted the rules, has noted that the wide adoption of these rules in international arbitration has led in practice to an unexpected use by common law practitioners to limit disclosure and by civil law practitioners to expand it.

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