Originally from Pro-Arbitration Revisited: A Tribute to Professor George Bermann from his Students Over the Years

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Singapore is a jurisdiction which, consistent with its aspiration to be the Asian hub of arbitration (see Professor Michael Pryles, Singapore—The Hub of Arbitration in Asia, in CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION AND MEDIATION: THE FORDHAM PAPERS (2012) (Arthur W. Rovine ed., 2013)), is often characterized as steered by a “pro-arbitration” philosophy. That, of course, begs the question of what to be “pro-arbitration” means, and, the corollary, “is the generally-accepted conception of ‘pro-arbitration’ posited within Singapore entirely consistent with international arbitration’s core interests?” 

The Singapore International Commercial Court (SICC) recently defined Singapore courts’ policy of “minimum curial intervention,” by “read[ing] awards without seeking to construe them as a statute or adopting an overly technical stance, with a view to according them the finality that an arbitration is intended to bring about,” as “essentially pro-arbitration” (see CKG v. CKH [2021] 5 SLR 84 at ¶ 7 (“CKG v. CKH”), per Jeremy Lionel Cooke IJ). A leading Singapore treatise also considers Singapore as being “pro-arbitration” because its courts have “set aside an arbitration award in only a handful of decisions… generally confined to domestic arbitral awards” (see Singapore International Arbitration: Law and Practice (2d ed), 338). In fact, parties even consider it fashionable to portray their arguments as “pro-arbitration” (see, e.g., CDM and another v CDP [2021] 2 SLR 235 at ¶ 49; BTN and another v. BTP and another [2021] 1 SLR 276 at ¶ 67), in an attempt to bolster their submissions with the Singapore courts, following the Singapore Court of Appeal’s watershed pronouncement in Tjong Very Sumito and others v. Antig Investments Pte Ltd [2009] 4 SLR(R) 732 at 
¶¶ 28–29.