5th East Africa Pre-Moot and Arbitration Conference

International arbitration emerged as the preferred mechanism for resolving cross-border commercial and investment disputes during the twentieth century, anchored by the 1958 New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, which now binds more than 170 states and gives arbitral awards near-universal enforceability. The 1985 UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, revised in 2006, has been adopted in whole or in part by some 90 jurisdictions, harmonising procedural standards around party autonomy, arbitrator independence, and limited judicial review. Major institutions such as the ICC International Court of Arbitration, the LCIA, SIAC, HKIAC, and regional centres including the Nairobi Centre for International Arbitration and the Kigali International Arbitration Centre administer thousands of cases per year. The field has expanded beyond commercial disputes to investor-state arbitration under bilateral investment treaties and instruments like the ICSID Convention (1966) and the Energy Charter Treaty. This growth has triggered a legitimacy debate: critics point to inconsistent awards, costs, lack of transparency, and constraints on state regulatory sovereignty, prompting reform efforts including UNCITRAL Working Group III's negotiations on ISDS reform, the Mauritius Convention on Transparency, and proposals for a multilateral investment court. African states in particular have moved to localise arbitration capacity, with several withdrawing from or renegotiating BITs and promoting seats in Nairobi, Kigali, Lagos, Cairo, and Mauritius. Today the central debates concern third-party funding, diversity on tribunals, the use of expedited and emergency arbitrator procedures, the enforcement of awards against sovereign assets, and the interaction between arbitration and competing public policy concerns such as corruption, human rights, and climate obligations. East Africa's emergence as an arbitration hub, supported by modernised national arbitration acts and pro-arbitration judiciaries, sits at the heart of these developments.

Modern commercial law governs the contracts, instruments, and institutions through which goods, services, and capital move across borders. Its international architecture rests on instruments developed largely after the Second World War: the 1980 United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG), now in force in over 95 states; UNCITRAL model laws on electronic commerce, secured transactions, and cross-border insolvency; the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts; and the ICC's Incoterms and uniform rules on documentary credits. Together these texts seek to reduce transactional friction by providing predictable default rules where national laws diverge. In East Africa, commercial law has been shaped by the East African Community's common market protocol, regional efforts to harmonise company, insolvency, and competition law, and the entry into force of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in 2021, which envisages protocols on trade in goods, services, investment, intellectual property, competition, and digital trade. National reforms have modernised secured transactions registries, electronic signatures, and movable collateral regimes, while courts have grappled with questions of choice of law, enforcement of foreign judgments, and the treatment of standard-form and adhesion contracts. Contemporary issues include the regulation of digital assets and platform commerce, ESG and supply-chain due diligence obligations, sanctions compliance, the resilience of cross-border payment and trade-finance systems, and the interaction between commercial contracts and force majeure events such as pandemics and conflict-driven disruptions. For African jurisdictions, the policy task is to attract investment and integrate into global value chains while preserving regulatory space over taxation, data, and strategic sectors.

The Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot was founded in 1993 in Vienna by Professor Eric Bergsten and the Institute of International Commercial Law at Pace University to train future lawyers in international sales law and arbitration. Each year teams from hundreds of law schools across more than 80 countries argue a hypothetical dispute drafted around the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) and a chosen set of arbitration rules. A parallel competition, the Vis East Moot, has been held in Hong Kong since 2003. The Moot has become the world's largest commercial arbitration moot and a recognised pipeline into the international arbitration bar. Pre-moots — regional practice rounds held in the months before Vienna and Hong Kong — have proliferated globally, including a strong East African circuit anchored in Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali, Dar es Salaam, and Addis Ababa. These events expose students from emerging jurisdictions to leading practitioners, address access barriers such as travel costs and visa constraints, and contribute to the regional diversification of arbitration practice. They also serve as fora for substantive debate on each year's problem, which typically tests cutting-edge issues such as third-party funding, emergency arbitration, applicable law, and the intersection of CISG with soft-law instruments. Key contemporary themes include broadening participation from the Global South, improving gender and geographic diversity on tribunals and counsel teams, and integrating moot training with national efforts to develop arbitration-friendly jurisdictions. Discussions also focus on how moot problems anticipate real-world developments — from sanctions and supply-chain disruption to AI-generated evidence — and on the role of academic institutions and bar associations in sustaining the pre-moot ecosystem.