Bibliographie sélective OHADA

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is one of the major emerging markets in the world. The economy of the UAE is the second largest in the Middle East (after Saudi Arabia), with an estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of USD 1422 billion in 2017. In connection with this economic development, the UAE attempted to establish a modernized legal system to accommodate domestic and foreign parties demanding efficient and independent dispute resolution. Many local and international companies, as well as individual investors operating in the UAE, agreed to submit their disputes to arbitration in their contracts as a neutral, efficient, predictable, and easily enforceable dispute resolution mechanism. However, historically, and due to specific incidents that happened during the western occupation to the Arab world, arbitration was frequently perceived in the Middle East as a western process that is neither naturally nor culturally connected to the traditional judicial system that was rooted in the Middle East's more developed countries in the 1950s and 1960s. This historical background could explain, to some extent, the existing animosity of certain national courts in Arab countries to international arbitration. Further, this is demonstration is closely connected to issues being studied in this dissertation in relation to: - The frequent number of arbitral awards being annulled in the UAE, and - The jurisdictional challenges to arbitral tribunals in the UAE. Studying UAE jurisprudence on cases confirming setting aside arbitral awards is one of the main themes being studied in the first Part of this thesis; the span of the study extends from 1995 to 2018. In order to diagnose the root causes of setting aside arbitral awards, it was essential to study each case that confirmed setting aside arbitral awards by UAE courts. Out of several hundred case laws in the UAE included in the study, over one hundred thirty case laws confirmed setting aside both domestic and international arbitral awards; each of these case laws was analyzed and discussed with particular emphasis on the problematic issues or procedure causing annulment. In order to suggest solutions to this problem, the research takes a comparative approach to contrast the UAE recognition and enforcement process of arbitral awards with more developed jurisdictions. France, naturally, is the primary jurisdiction for this comparative research. France has an international reputation as being one of the most (if not the most) supportive jurisdiction to recognizing arbitral awards and arbitration in general as a dispute resolution mechanism. Despite consuming considerable time searching for cases where the French courts set aside arbitral awards, only twenty-two case laws were identified where the French courts upheld the setting aside of arbitral awards. This relatively low number confirms the worldwide reputation that annulment of arbitral awards by the French courts is factually a rare incident given the considerable number of awards seated and/or being enforced in France. The broader comparative perspective reflects a consistent pattern that most developed jurisdictions generally respect, support, and recognizes arbitral awards. This has developed a general perception among parties to arbitration that arbitral awards, once issued, should be enforced voluntarily before initiating the enforcement process, whereby award debtors do not seek annulment and voluntarily satisfy the arbitral awards before the commencement of the enforcement proceedings due to their prior knowledge that national courts are likely to recognize and respect to arbitral awards.