I.  BASIC INFORMATION

A. History and Background of the Institution 

As a former republic of the USSR, Ukraine did not have its own arbitration institutions. The monopoly of foreign trade enjoyed by the Soviet state had yielded the monopoly of resolving commercial disputes involving foreign parties for only two institutions based in Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union—namely, the Arbitration Court at the All-Union Chamber of Commerce and Industry (known as Foreign Trade Arbitration Commission before 1987) and the Maritime Arbitration Commission.

Although such chambers of commerce and industry existed in every Soviet republic, arbitration institutions in question were established only in Moscow with no affiliates or subsidiaries outside the capital.

Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the newly independent Ukrainian state faced plenty of challenges including the proper administration of trade disputes with foreign parties. For several months, no such institution that could have resolved these disputes was in place.

Conscious of this legal vacuum, the Parliament of Ukraine, when it established the legal framework for foreign trade for Ukrainian nationals by adopting the Law on Foreign Economic Activity, recommended that the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce and Industry establish a permanent arbitration body for prompt and efficient consideration of “foreign economic disputes.” Such institutions came into being on 11 August 1992, when the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce created the International Commercial Arbitration Court (ICACU) and the Maritime Arbitration Commission (MACU). However, from their very inception both institutions were daunted by lack of legal basis for their functioning. To cure this complicated situation the Law on International Commercial Arbitration was passed on 24 February 1994 (effective 20 April 1994)