It is really a great pleasure for me today to speak and be able to

look back at ten years of Swiss Rules.1 My subject is the background of

the Swiss Rules 2004 so let me put this in a very concise way because I

believe that most of you are quite familiar with what happened ten or

12 years ago.

 

 

In the 1990s and 2000 a number of European countries already

offered institutional arbitration through national arbitration systems;

however, Switzerland did not. Switzerland remained fragmented at

that time. The Chambers of Commerce and Industry of Zurich,

Geneva, Lugano, Basel, Lausanne, Bern had various arbitration rules,

but these arbitration rules were quite different from each other and,

even worse, did not address modern arbitration development.

Therefore, there was not only a lack of unity but also a lack of

transparency for observers outside Switzerland. Nobody really

understood what was going on. We had not realised the full potential

of what Switzerland could have been doing, so in 1997 the idea started

to unify these various rules and create one arbitration system.

 

 

My topic is to describe in a few words the process of the drafting

of the 2004 Swiss Rules, and I will indeed be short. It is a history of

battles and war stories. It was very tough—I can confirm this without

hesitation—with three to four years of political lobbying before any
breakthrough was achieved. At one stage, one of the Chambers of