Originally from Asian Leading Arbitrators' Guide to International Arbitration

I. WHAT IS ARBITRATION?

In its traditional form, arbitration is understood as a private process of dispute resolution where parties agree to submit their dispute to a neutral and impartial third person for hearing and decision. The decision, commonly referred to as an award, is a final determination of the dispute and is binding upon the parties. Over time, there have been numerous variants of this process so it has become quite difficult to provide a definition of arbitration that will encompass all of them. At the time the Working Group1 was preparing the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration [the “Model Law”], the UNCITRAL Secretariat submitted a draft of a definition of arbitration. In the First Secretariat Note: Possible Features of a Model Law,2 it was recognized that it was difficult to distinguish between arbitration as regulated by the Model Law and those procedures which, although sometimes labeled arbitration, are or should not be within its scope.3 Eventually, no definition was included in the Model Law. It was decided that the term is well known and understood in many jurisdictions and that such a definition is no longer necessary to be made in the Model Law itself.