Originally From World Arbitration and Mediation Review (WAMR)

I. INTRODUCTION

In the ICSID case Suez v. Argentina, when Argentina challenged one arbitrator on the ground that she was a director at Swiss bank UBS - which held a 2% stake in one of the claimant companies, her fellow co-arbitrators dismissed the challenge on May 12, 2008,1

Arbitrators are not disembodied spirits dwelling on Mars, who descend to earth to arbitrate a case and then immediately return to their Martian retreat to await inertly the call to arbitrate another. Like other professionals living and working in the world, arbitrators have a variety of complex connections with all sorts of persons and institutions. It has been asserted by some scholars that there are only “six degrees of separation” between one person and any other person on earth. The theory of six degrees of separation holds that if a person is one step or “degree” away from each person he or she knows, and two steps or two degrees away from each person known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is an average of six steps or six degrees away from each person on the globe. While the validity of this theory certainly remains to be proven, its application does demonstrate how easily one may make connections between one person and another through the process of identifying real or alleged links. drawing on a well-known argument:

Arbitrators are not disembodied spirits dwelling on Mars, who descend to earth to arbitrate a case and then immediately return to their Martian retreat to await inertly the call to arbitrate another. Like other professionals living and working in the world, arbitrators have a variety of complex connections with all sorts of persons and institutions. It has been asserted by some scholars that there are only “six degrees of separation” between one person and any other person on earth. The theory of six degrees of separation holds that if a person is one step or “degree” away from each person he or she knows, and two steps or two degrees away from each person known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is an average of six steps or six degrees away from each person on the globe. While the validity of this theory certainly remains to be proven, its application does demonstrate how easily one may make connections between one person and another through the process of identifying real or alleged links.