Originally from World Arbitration And Mediation Review (WAMR)

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I. INTRODUCTION
In regulating international arbitration, general principles are
often preferable to detailed prescriptions. But this is not always
so. And, it may be least so in regulating those junctures in an
arbitration when arbitrators must take swift, concrete action –
and when one of the parties may question their right to do so.
UNCITRAL’s Arbitration Working Group reached precisely this
conclusion in 2006 when it revised Article 17 of the Model Law on
International Commercial Arbitration (the Model Law). For the
previous 20 years, Article 17 had authorized tribunals to issue
interim measures of protection in very general terms. Delegates
decided in 2006 to replace that general language with a far more
detailed regime of rules and conditions for issuing such measures.
The story of how this came about is circuitous, since delegates
set out in 2000 to do something quite different and more limited:
to add a mechanism to the Model Law for court enforcement of
arbitral interim measures. Few delegates would have predicted
that, six years after taking up that task, they would also have
established comprehensive requirements for arbitrators’ own
issuance of interim measures and have authorized, as well, the
issuance of interim measures in support of arbitration by national