Oline arbitration: acomparative law study

Abstract

This research emerged from the questions about the validity of the arbitral agreements, arbitral procedures and arbitral awards, all of them developed by electronic means.

In order to arise to the possible solutions of those sorts of questions, it was made, in its first stage, a complex comparative chart that shows the arbitral formal requirements established in the different legislations around the world for both international and domestic arbitrations, and their relation with the corresponding "functional-equivalent" derived from the local law on electronic commerce.

That comparative chart included the legislations of Colombia, Germany, United States, Australia, Hong Kong, and United Kingdom. They were chosen in order to be able to represent the different legal systems that exist in the whole world, and also accordingly to their international political and commercial importance.

Additionally, because there is no enough bibliographical material to support this subject matter, in a second part of this first stage, there were included some brief accounts of specialized journals articles about related topics, which brought significant references to the development of the investigation. For this reason, they were graded taking into account the relevant information supplied and their relation with the analyzed problems.

As a result of the first research stage, it was concluded that it is possible to develop online or electronic arbitrations in the mentioned places because their legislations allow them. However, one of the main issues that has to be faced soon is the particular cultural background of each place, because they are, in some cases, extremely different and formalist.