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Since the 1970s, Tunisia has followed a liberal logic aimed at boosting its economy by encouraging private initiative and attracting foreign investment. The use of arbitration as a private dispute mode of resolution was therefore strongly encouraged. This clear desire of the legislator to encourage arbitration could not succeed without effective intervention and a disposition to promote this mode of settlement of disputes by the judge. This paper aims to show the positive role of the Tunisian judiciary in the promotion of arbitration, in providing assistance for the constitution of the arbitral tribunal and its operation, or when interpreting and applying the Code of Arbitration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, given the « Ciceronian » title « To convince the arbitrator », is very unlikely to offer new guidance to international arbitration practitioners, such as lawyers, arbitrators and legal experts, who will themselves have already experienced efforts to convince an arbitrator in arbitral proceedings. Its humble objective, apart from offering some entry-level instruction to « juniors » about to take their first steps on the way to becoming seasoned professionals in the field, is primarily to record in writing, in a methodological form, what remains today a part of an oral tradition: the methods and experience of all those who engage in the intellectual combat of arbitral proceedings. For teams of lawyers, it also provides an insight into the likely reactions of the arbitrators they appear before, reactions which will not necessarily be those that they expected when they devised their litigation strategy. This article also has the virtue of systematically comparing State-based and arbitral proceedings so as to identify and explain their similarities and differences. Finally, in the spirit of the great French jurist, Jean Carbonnier, this paper aims, by building on sociological considerations, to reflect on the practice of arbitration law and explore ways of making it even more effective. The study finds a natural division into two parts by focusing on the behaviour of first the lawyer and, second, the witness; the two main protagonists in arbitral proceedings facing private judges whom they must convince using didactic and rhetorical tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 21 February 2017, the Paris Court of Appeal annulled an arbitral award rendered in France against the Kyrgyz Republic, the latter having been found by the arbitrators to have expropriated the investment of a Latvian owner of a local bank in violation of the Latvia-Kyrgyzstan BIT. Turning its back to the positions taken by the arbitrators in their award, the Court held that there was enough circumstantial evidence to conclude that the Kyrgyz bank had only been acquired by the Latvian investor to pursue in the host State - through his links with the son of the then Kyrgyz head of State - large-scale money laundering activities. According the Court, the compensation granted to the investor by the award as a result of the expropriation therefore merely served to reward money laundering, an activity prohibited by French international public policy. The award could accordingly not be recognized or enforced in France without violating such public policy, thereby rendering the Kyrgyz Republic's request for annulment valid. This paper first recalls the very unfortunate background against which this judgment was handed down, namely one of divisions in, and fluctuations of, French case law regarding the extent to which awards can be interfered with on the basis of their non-compliance with international public policy. It then discusses the unique features of the judgment itself, a judgment which has already been appealed to the French Cour de cassation by the Latvian investor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]