Signature Litigation: Policing arbitration – can accountability deficit be addressed?

Over recent decades, arbitration for dispute resolution has become increasingly popular. Commercial parties are becoming far more amenable to resolving their differences by private means rather than through national court systems, which can be more costly and time-intensive. There is, of course, nothing wrong in engaging in a private, consensual process and there are numerous advantages of doing so. But the framework within which such disputes are resolved must be unimpeachably robust in order to meet the objective in any dispute resolution process: to do justice between the parties in accordance with the law. Accordingly parties’ autonomous right to submit disputes to arbitration needs to be structured within a legislative framework which governs and regulates the arbitral process. This is in part to: