Originally from: The Rise of Transparency in International Arbitration

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For a long time the issue of confidentiality in the context of international commercial arbitration has not aroused much interest or particular problems. Indeed, confidentiality has always been considered, on the one hand, as a typical effect of arbitration proceedings and, on the other hand, as one of the main advantages of such an instrument as opposed to the cases brought before state courts. Scholars and case law that occasionally dealt with confidentiality justify its existence with various arguments, mainly qualifying it as an implicit effect of the arbitration agreement and therefore of the parties' intentions.2

In a nutshell, it basically imposes a duty upon the parties and arbitrators not to disclose to persons not involved in the proceedings any information or document that is revealed during the proceedings. In this respect, English and US scholars, traditionally attentive to the phenomenon of international arbitration, coined the term confidentiality, to distinguish it from another, albeit related, notion, that is privacy, used to indicate the fact that the arbitration is not public and therefore only the parties or persons authorized by them may attend the hearings.3