Originally from: Stockholm International Arbitration Review

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THE SNF v. INTERNATIONAL CHAMBER OF COMMERCE CASE AND THE OBLIGATION TO CONDUCT ARBITRATION PROCEEDINGS WITH "EXPECTED DISPATCH ”

Elie Kleiman

"Back in the days of the French revolution, at the end of the 18th century, a tortoise was going its nonchalant way in a gallery of the former Royal palace of Saint-Louis. There, the slow moving quadruped bumped into a judge…" The above should not be mistaken for the introduction of some obscure, forgotten French fable. Any visitors to the former palace of King Saint Louis, now the Court House of the City of Paris, may check for themselves: in the "Salle des Pas-Perdus" next to the statue of the famous advocate and lawmaker Berryer, there sits, set in marble, a tortoise. On the back of the tortoise lays the foot of a young woman, the allegory of Justice, in representation of the slowness of the judicial system.

The relationship between time and justice has many faces to it. If the dispatch of justice is only one of them, surely it is not the least important. "Justice delayed is justice denied," the multi secular adage goes. The relatively young European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) established the right for every person to be heard within a reasonable time. Lord Woolf more recently stated in his report on access to justice in 1996, "delay has long been recognized as the enemy of justice." Arbitration is no exception. Time has been said to be "a particularly precious commodity in international arbitral proceedings." However, while, speed has traditionally been said to be part of arbitration’s advantages, it now appears that, quite often, arbitral proceedings can be subject to increasing delays.