Originially from: World Arbitration and Mediation Review (WAMR)

The New German Law on Arbitration
The new German law on arbitration came into effect on January 1,
1998. The legislation represents the culmination of a project begun several
years ago. In September 1991, the German Ministry of Justice established
a commission of experts to revise the arbitration law contained in the
German Code of Civil Procedure. The Commission members were: Dr.
Walter Rolland, chair, Jens Bredow, Dr. Ottarndt Glossner, Dr. Gerald
Herrman, Dois Möller, Prof. Dr. Hans-Jhrgen Rabe, Prof. Dr. Peter
Schlosser, Dr. Inga Schmidt-Syaben, and Werner Weib. The mandate of
the commission was to reformulate the current law in accordance with the
principles established by the UNCITRAL Model Law on Arbitration. It
was also the commission's objective to integrate all the important legal
provisions on arbitration into a single legislative text, namely, Book Ten
of the Code of Civil Procedure. Grouping the relevant legal rules into a
single source would allow ready access to the law, especially by foreign
lawyers.
The commission held seven sessions and produced a draft law in
February 1994. In 1996 and 1997, the German Government and the
Federal Judiciary Committee amended the draft and then introduced it to
the legislature. The Bundestag passed the law on November 27, 1997, and
the Bunderat on December 19, 1997. The President of Germany signed the
law on December 30, 1997.
For reasons that remain unclear, the international commercial
community has never conceived of Germany as a major situs for
arbitrations. Germany, however, is a major player in global and European
commerce; its companies and merchants participate annually in numerous
international commercial arbitrations. Moreover, Germany has a long
tradition of domestic arbitration, and has ratified all the major
international conventions on arbitration. Part of the motivation for using
the UNCITRAL Model Law as the basis for the revision of national law
was to enhance Germany's status as a venue for international arbitral
proceedings. The adoption of the UNCITRAL law demonstrates that the
German legal system espouses international standards of arbitral law and
practice. Also, it makes the German law of arbitration automatically
accessible to any transborder party familiar with the UNCITRAL model.
The UNCITRAL Model Law has been adopted in nearly thirty
jurisdictions.
The Commission Report (Kommission zur Neuordnung des
Schiedsverfahrensrechts, Bericht mit einem DisKussionsentwurf zur
Neufassung des Zehnten Buches der ZPO [1994]) underscores some of the