Originally from: Stockholm International Arbitration Review

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MANIFEST LACK OF JURISDICTION?
A Selection of Decisions of the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce concerning the Prima Facie Existence of an Arbitration Agreement (2005-2009)

David Ramsjö and Siri Strömberg

1. INTRODUCTION It is a well-known principle in international arbitration that arbitration is not legally permissible if the subject matter of the dispute is not arbitrable or if the dispute in question is not covered by a valid arbitration agreement. Once an institutional arbitration has been commenced, some administering institutions are empowered to decide, by an initial and summary procedure, if they are entitled to continue to administer the dispute. A primary function of said institution will thus be to make a prima facie determination of the validity and applicability of the arbitration agreement, i.e. to assess whether a valid arbitration agreement exists, whether it applies to the dispute at hand and whether the agreement is subject to the arbitration rules of that particular institute.

The Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce ("the SCC") decides on jurisdictional issues if the respondent has raised a jurisdictional objection, which will usually be done in the respondent’s answer to the claimant’s request for arbitration. From January 2005--when a presentation on SCC prima facie decisions was last published in the Stockholm Arbitration Report--through December 2009, 720 arbitral proceedings were commenced at the SCC using the SCC Arbitration Rules or the Rules for Expedited Arbitrations. Jurisdictional decisions were issued in 131 of these cases. In the overwhelming majority of cases (125 out of 131) the Board of Directors of the SCC ("the Board") concluded that the SCC did not manifestly lack jurisdiction over the dispute.