Number of Arbitrators and Decisions of Arbitral Tribunals

THIS ARTICLE deals with the current status and the prospects for change in relation to two ‘classical rules’ of the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules, with special reference to the new Austrian arbitral legislation.1 Under article 5 of the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules (UAR) the parties can agree on one or three arbitrators. Their agreement can be made either in the contract, in the arbitration agreement, or within 15 days after the respondent receives the notice of arbitration. If there is no agreement when the 15-day period expires, the number of arbitrators is three. Under article 31 UAR, in principle the panel of arbitrators decides by a majority of all appointed arbitrators. These rules can already be considered as classics in the arbitration universe. Similar rules can now be found in a number of arbitration rules as well as in the laws on arbitration of several countries. Once they were established in the UAR, they were used as the model for a number of subsequent acts. Inter alia , a decade later they influenced Articles 10 and 29 of the 1985 UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration (ML). At that time, it was stated that the rule on the number of arbitrators, ‘once it reached its current form early in the drafting … occasioned virtually no controversy … even though it would work a significant change in the laws of some countries’.2 The same (or almost the same) could be stated for article 31 UAR (at least until the occurrence of the well-publicised, yet maybe still over-emphasised, problem of the ‘truncated tribunals’). In this article, we will first analyse several elements in article 5 UAR under the following three topics: 1. Number of arbitrators and party autonomy