Emergency Arbitrator System In International Commercial Arbitration

The trend of economic globalization has caused a huge growth in investment and trade among the countries, which also leads to the increase of all kinds of international commercial disputes. International commercial arbitration, with its advantages such as professional and convenient, has been widely recognized by the international trade and business parties, and has gradually developed into one of the main ways to resolve international commercial disputes. In practice, when facing the rapidly changing international market, the parties hope to get maximum protection of their lawful rights and interests through a set of efficient and convenient temporary relief system, to timely and effectively avoid the transfer of the involved property, the loss of the important evidence and to ensure the smooth implementation of the final arbitration award. Although the power of the arbitration tribunal to issue interim measures has been generally approved by the international community, but in practice, the constitution of the international commercial arbitration tribunal may take weeks or even months, while there are no clear rules on the power of the arbitration tribunal to issue interim measures before the formation of the arbitration tribunal. Therefore, once a dispute occurs, a lot of international commercial arbitration parties will still choose to apply for the interim relief measures from the court in the first place, which will no doubt run counter to the original intention of the parties when they agreed on the arbitration clause.To comply with the development of international commercial arbitration practice, many international commercial arbitration institutions successively amend their arbitration rules and add the "emergency arbitrator system" with its relevant processes in recent years, which formally give emergency arbitrator the power to issue relief measures when he thought necessary, before the formation of the arbitration tribunal. The emergence of the system effectively make up for the deficiency of current arbitration tribunal in temporary relief measures, providing a complete set of system guarantee, to improve the arbitration mechanism, and to protect the lawful rights and interests of the parties more timely and comprehensively. However, problems in practice such as the decision made by emergency arbitrator cannot restrain a third party, the standard of the emergency situation, and the execution of emergency decision, are all testing the new system.In this paper, we adopted the method of comparative analysis, comparing the relevant provisions of the emergency arbitration system through:International Arbitration Rules of the American Arbitration Association in 2009 (hereinafter referred to as the "AAA2009 Rules"), Rules of the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce in 2010 (hereinafter referred to as the "SCC2010 Rules"), Arbitration Rules of the Singapore international arbitration center in 2010 (hereinafter referred to as the "SIAC2010 Rules"), Arbitration Rules of the International Chamber of Commerce in 2012 (hereinafter referred to as the "ICC2012 Rules"), Hong Kong International Arbitration Center Administered Arbitration Rules in 2013 (hereinafter referred to as the "HKIAC2013 Rules"), and China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone Court Arbitration Rules in 2014 (hereinafter referred to as the " FTZ Rules "), China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission Arbitration Rules in 2015 (hereinafter referred to as the "CIETAC2015 Rules"), and we also gave a systematical introduction of the emergency arbitrator system from four chapters. The First Chapter analyzed the definition, characteristic, historical origins and development of the emergency arbitrator system; the Second Chapter discussed the operational mode of the emergency arbitrator system from three aspects:the application of the emergency arbitrator system, the appointment of an emergency arbitrator as well as the power and limits of an emergency arbitrator; the Third Chapter centered on the execution of the emergency awards or decisions and gave some thinking on the main problems of the emergency arbitrator systems; the Forth Chapter gave an overview of the development and made a prospect for the future development of the emergency arbitrator system in China. We wished to bait a piece of jade with a brick, caused your attention and thinking to this new system.