INDEPENDENT Senator Charrise Seepersad urged an update in TT's arbitration laws to attract foreign investment, but also weighed the benefits and the shortcomings of arbitration relative to formal legal proceedings, speaking on Tuesday in the Senate debate on the Arbitration Bill 2023.
The bill was amended at committee stage and passed by the Senate, and will head to the House of Representatives.
While arbitration is separate to court proceedings, an arbitrator can seek a court-input or alternatively a court can refer a matter to arbitration, Seepersad said.
She said the current arbitration act dated from 1939 – and was based on 1889 and 1934 British laws – before modern commercial legislation and best practices and before modern technology such as cellphones and the Internet had emerged.
"Trade and industrial practices have changed dramatically since 1939 but our laws relating to arbitration have not been modernised."
Seepersad said an updated model of arbitration law crafted by the UN (as amended in 2006) has been adopted by 119 jurisdictions including 86 States, including the US, Canada, Singapore India, Australia and Jamaica and Barbados.
She said arbitration had become a standard requirement in most modern contracts for dispute resolution and, if TT wished to attract international trade and investment and be an attractive venue for international arbitrations to be held, TT's arbitration laws must be internationally certified and be named in global lists of such jurisdictions.
Seepersad said arbitration could help avert the current backlog of cases in TT's law courts.
"Businesses including international investors demand neutral, timely, cost-efficient, enforceable and predictable arbitration and dispute resolution mechanisms."
She said modernised arbitration laws would encourage disputants to choose arbitration to resolve their differences and so greatly relieve the burden on TT's law courts.
"Mr President, businesses are not prepared to wait two years or more to have their cases heard and then face the possibility of an appeal resulting in further delay and possibly compromising operations.
"Businesses would prefer an independent neutral person with subject matter and dispute resolution experience to hear the evidence and submissions of the parties and then have an expert arbitrator rule on the matter, based on the provisions for dispute settlement which are included in the contract."
She said TT ranked a paltry 174th out of 190 countries in a 2019 World Bank study on the ease of doing business as regarded contract enforcement, taking three years and eight months to resolve a commercial dispute, worse than two years and two months for the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America.
Seepersad set out some of the advantages of arbitration as a process, over litigation. She said arbitration was quicker, offered more flexibility for scheduling and less formalities, and may involve arbitrators with specific technical knowledge (beyond the mere legal knowledge which judges may) and so as to g
