For the past 5 years, Israel has been working hard to develop very fast or supersonic mechanism for dispute resolution specialized for cross-border disputes in the tech sector. Can you tell us how this idea came to be born and how it has developed over the years?
- In the past two decades, Israel has been involved in the global work on reform of existing rules on dispute resolution in forums like UNCITRAL (the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law) and ICSID. As part of these efforts, we continuously explored aspects of dispute resolution processes which can be improved, with the view of providing redress to real life problems of Israeli and global stakeholders.
- Thinking about the different problems, we decided in 2018 to pursue a project with technological aspects in light of the overall global trend of developing dispute resolution frameworks responding to the changing nature of how global commercial transactions were conducted. During the 2019 Tel-Aviv Arbitration week we heard listened carefully to a presentation made by Menashe Cohen on rules developed by the Israeli Institute for Commercial Arbitration for dispute resolution between hi-tech companies.
- In the following months we consulted with Israeli stakeholders, colleagues from fellow delegations to UNCITRAL, and the UNCITRAL Secretariat, and prepared a brief outline of a proposal for future work for UNCITRAL to consider. This work resulted in a proposal that Israel and Japan submitted to the UNCITRAL Commission in 2019. The Commission decided to mandate the UNCITRAL Secretariat to undertake exploratory work on this issue. In the two years that followed, an expert group set up by UNCITRAL worked on developing an initial draft of model clauses for resolution of hi-tech related disputes and the issue was discussed in various conferences including SOLAIR and in our roundtables on private and commercial international law.
- In 2022, the UNCITRAL Commission adopted our proposal with Japan for UNCITRAL to undertake work on developing model clauses for technology related disputes and adjudication. The addition of adjudication to the project resulted from a proposal by Switzerland and the understanding in the Commission that some form of adjudication could be helpful for resolution of technology related disputes. Since the summer, UNCITRAL Working Group II has been discussing the model clauses. Hopefully in a year or two the work would be completed and the outcome would be an important contribution to Hi-Tech companies in the resolution of their disputes as well as to other industries where "supersonic" arbitration is necessary to avoid the determinantal effect a dispute can have on the life of a company or a project.
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