Originally from World Arbitration And Mediation Review (WAMR)

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TEN YEARS OF UNCITRAL MODEL LAW

IN GERMANY
By Stefan Kröll* and Peter Kraft**

I. INTRODUCTION
On January 1, 1998, Germany enacted a new Arbitration Law which is
to a large extent a verbatim adoption of the UNCITRAL Model Law on
International Commercial Arbitration (“Model Law”). By adopting the
Model Law, the German legislature followed the recommendation of
UNCITRAL which, when the model law was introduced, expressly
mentioned Germany as one of the countries for which the adoption of the
Model Law could be useful.1
Germany indeed met some important preconditions for becoming a
preferred seat for international commercial arbitration proceedings.
Germany was then and still is a major player in international commerce. It
had a fairly developed and long-standing history of arbitration as well as the
required infrastructure. In the words of the UN document,2 however, its
then existing legislation on arbitration was antiquated and made obsolete by
the practices of modern international commercial arbitration.3
Nearly ten years have passed since the adoption of the Model Law. The
“new” law has been applied in thousands of arbitration proceedings and
several hundred arbitration-related court proceedings. Its adoption, in