Brazilian Lawyer in Europe - part 3 - The work of UNCITRAL

In the last post I mentioned the UNCITRAL as an important commission of the UN located in Vienna. Even though its office gets a bit lost in the huge headquarters of the United Nations and it is not part of the official tour – focused on the UN’s humanitarian work – the UNCITRAL is without a doubt the main UN arm when it concerns international trade law.

The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) was created by the UN General Assembly in 1966, with the purpose of fixing recognized disparities in national laws about international trade and to further the progressive harmonization and unification of the law of international trade.
The Commission has since come to be the core legal body of the United Nations system in the field of international trade law.

Among the works of the UNCITRAL is the development of Model Laws, which are a suggestion of a legal text for States that want to modernize their internal laws and regulations and be in unison with laws from other countries on a specific area. They are the result of wide research on national laws on a given subject and represent what the Commission calls that worldwide consensus on that subject.

The most known example of a UNCITRAL Model Law is the Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, enacted 1985 and amended in 2006. According to the Commission, more than 60 countries have enacted legislations based on the Model Law, which is a great contribution to the harmonization sought by the institution. In other countries, such as Brazil, the Arbitration Law, even though not considered Model-Law legislation, definitely shows signs of its influence and the international standards that it represents.

I have a paper to be conclude on the comparison between the Brazilian Arbitration Law and the UNCITRAL Model Law. I won’t publish it here because it still needs some final touches. However, if anyone is interested in the sketch in Portuguese, please contact me.

For more on the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, visit their website: http://www.uncitral.org/uncitral/en/uncitral_texts/arbitration/1985Model_arbitration.html