Originally from World Arbitration and Mediation Review

I.            Introduction

Arbitrating corruption issues tends to highlight what has been called the paradox of arbitration, i.e., that arbitration must remain tethered to the very public authorities it seeks freedom from.  And while friction is perhaps inevitable with public illegalities being addressed in what are essentially private procedures, it is also a useful litmus test of arbitration’s fitness to deal with rapidly expanding frontiers.

This paper explores the challenges of arbitrating issues of corruption in the Indian context where the extant lex arbitri appears ill-equipped and where recent changes, as argued, have only exacerbated this position.

To put the scourge of corruption in context, it costs – as quantified in 2007 – the global economy a staggering $2.6 trillion annually, eroding public institutions and social equity alike.  And it exists despite the numerous anti-corruption instruments across jurisdictions and institutional mechanisms (“conditionality,” “transparency,” and “surveillance”) administered by the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), respectively.