The abuse of arbitral law

The academic success of international arbitration in the last decades has not always been followed by the consequent development of concrete instrument for its practical applications. The concept of an arbitral legal order detached from national legal systems is defended by doctrine not so much as an useful instrument for practical case resolution, but firstly as a problem of raising a logic and coherent legal scheme. We propose to analyze the main distortions caused by the conflict between this theoretical perspective of an autonomous legal order and the practical matters involved in the pragmatic courts intervention in international arbitration, either relating to the arbitral convention (provisional measures, violation of the arbitration clause) or to the arbitral award, specifically regarding the problem of recognizing annulled awards. We present lis pendens, anti-suit injunctions, res judicata and the efforts of dialogue between jurisdictions judging the sentence regularity as the main instruments contributing to a dialogue, and thus, as instruments to control its possible distortions. However, those mechanisms are deployed through a reasoning that is still too generic, amoral and based in principles of private international law, in a state-centered perspective that cannot serve the international arbitration scheme today. From this finding, we suggest the abuse of rights doctrine as a group of different objectives and subjective standards allowing implementing those mechanisms to control international arbitration in a much more appropriate way, considering its autonomous and material characteristics, embodied in the doctrinal pursuit of an arbitral legal order. This doctrine brings a more flexible, material and finalistic perspective to the international arbitration instruments, approaching the parties interests and leaving a purely conflictual method which is not anymore appropriate in this field. There will be not anymore only distortions of an arbitral legal order, but abuses of that same arbitral legal order.
Keywords: International arbitration - arbitral legal order - lex mercatoria - abuse - fraud - good faith - estoppel - damages - costs - anti-suit injunctions - abuse of procedure - abuse of rights - award - convention - arbitration clause - provisional measures - exequatur - competence-competence -lis pendens - res judicata - annulment - recognition.