SCCA International Arabic Moot (SIAM7)

International commercial arbitration emerged in the twentieth century as the principal mechanism for resolving cross-border business disputes outside national courts. Its modern framework rests on the 1958 New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, now ratified by over 170 states, together with the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration (1985, amended 2006) and institutional rules from bodies such as the ICC, LCIA, SIAC, HKIAC, and the Cairo Regional Centre for International Commercial Arbitration. These instruments allow parties to choose neutral seats, arbitrators, and procedures, and to enforce awards across borders with limited judicial review. In the Arab world, arbitration has expanded rapidly alongside the growth of trade, energy, and construction sectors. Centres such as the DIFC-LCIA (restructured into the Dubai International Arbitration Centre in 2021), the Bahrain Chamber for Dispute Resolution, the Saudi Center for Commercial Arbitration, and the Cairo Regional Centre have positioned the region as an increasingly significant arbitral hub. Reforms to national arbitration laws — including Saudi Arabia's 2012 law, the UAE's 2018 Federal Arbitration Law, and Egypt's Law No. 27 of 1994 — have aligned domestic regimes more closely with the UNCITRAL Model Law, while courts have grown more receptive to enforcing foreign awards. Contemporary debate centres on the balance between party autonomy and public policy, the arbitrability of disputes involving state entities, transparency and third-party funding, the interaction between Sharia principles and international arbitral practice, and the legitimacy crisis facing investor-state dispute settlement. Questions of seat selection, enforcement under the Riyadh Arab Convention (1983) versus the New York Convention, and the rise of virtual hearings post-COVID continue to shape how practitioners and states approach cross-border dispute resolution.

Commercial law governs the rules and practices of trade, contracts, sale of goods, agency, companies, banking, and insolvency. Its modern international architecture has been built incrementally through instruments such as the 1980 UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG), UNCITRAL model laws on electronic commerce, secured transactions, and cross-border insolvency, the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts, and ICC instruments such as the Incoterms and the Uniform Customs and Practice for Documentary Credits. Together these frameworks seek to harmonize disparate national regimes and reduce transaction costs in cross-border commerce. Arab legal systems combine civil-law codifications — many descended from the Egyptian Civil Code of 1948 drafted under Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri — with Islamic commercial law principles, particularly in banking, finance, and contract formation. Recent decades have seen extensive modernization: the UAE enacted a new Commercial Transactions Law in 2022 and overhauled its companies and bankruptcy regimes; Saudi Arabia introduced a Bankruptcy Law (2018), a Companies Law (2022), and a Civil Transactions Law (2023); and Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, and Morocco have updated company, secured transactions, and competition statutes. The growth of Islamic finance, governed in part by AAOIFI standards, has created a parallel commercial ecosystem with global reach. Current issues include the digitalization of commerce and electronic transferable records, fintech regulation and cryptoassets, supply-chain disruptions and sanctions compliance, ESG and corporate governance obligations, the treatment of distressed companies under new insolvency regimes, and the interaction between national commercial codes and uniform international instruments. Tensions persist between harmonization efforts and the protection of distinctive national or Sharia-based commercial traditions.