Letter to Court members, 21 March 2019

It is with a great sense of loss that we learned on Sunday 17 March 2019 the passing of Professor Ahmed Sadek El Kosheri (former Vice-President of the ICC Court (1998-2009)).

Professor Ahmed Sadek El Kosheri

Professor Kosheri was a highly regarded scholar and a prominent figure of the international legal, academic, and arbitration communities.  He has significantly and outstandingly contributed to the development of the international public law doctrine and the international arbitration practices, handling over nearly half a century more than 100 arbitration cases where he acted as arbitrator, counsel or expert. In the 1980 decade, he was involved in numerous landmark investment arbitration cases: He defended Kuwait against the US oil company Aminoil over a nationalized oil concession, and represented his home country Egypt in an ICC arbitration brought by Southern Pacific Properties (SPP) over a cancelled construction project. The latter generated an ICSID case brought under Egypt’s foreign investment law, and what was to become known as the first ‘arbitration without privity’.

Within the state-state disputes, he played a key role in the sovereignty conflict between Eritrea and Yemen over the islands and the maritime space delimitation as well as in the Taba case involving a boundary dispute between Egypt and Israel.

His accomplishments duly earned him the GAR prize for life achievements in 2014 in Paris, a prize handed to him by his long-time friend, Pierre Tercier (himself a former President of the ICC Court) who paid tribute to Ahmed El Kosheri at the reception ceremony in his own words as one of those who ‘made arbitration what it is today’ praising him as ‘a model of compassion, tolerance, intelligence and finesse’.

Professor Kosheri has occupied throughout his lifetime career numerous notorious positions internationally and regionally: From the diplomatic functions he held in his early career as a cultural attaché for his country in France and the US in the 1970s, to sitting on the panel tasked with redesigning the United Nations’ procedures for internal disputes, in 2006.  He was also an appointed judge at the Administrative Tribunal of the World Bank and the African Development Bank in Abidjan (2009), and was the former president of the University of Senghor for African Development of Alexandria.

Professor Kosheri started his legal career in Egypt under the mentorship of El-Sanhourî’s (the father of the Egyptian Civil Code), as an assistant auditor at Egypt’s Council of State in 1952. He pursued his international studies in France. His doctoral thesis on ‘The notion of the international contract’ won a prize at the University of Rennes in France in 1962. As he repeatedly liked to share, his international studies brought him under the influence of ‘masters’ such as Rene-Jean Dupuy and Phocion Francescakis.

With his origins rooted in a millenary civilization, pervaded of the Arab culture and civilization, while being proudly and "profoundly African" (in his own words in his GAR acceptance speech, 2014) and imbued by western education, Professor Kosheri had what was truly an inclusive, and an inter-national outlook on arbitral justice shaped by universal principles of mankind that transcended stereotyped perceptions and constantly challenged inherited cleavages. His humanity, his wisdom and his personal integrity have made of him an inspirational figure recognized and held in high esteem by his peers, and by the younger generation whom he generously mentored throughout his lifetime and to whom he left a precious legacy.

Lately and as of 2009, Professor Kosheri had been chairing the advisory committee of the Cairo Regional Centre for International Commercial Arbitration. Sustaining until his last days a tireless commitment and a longstanding dedication, he continued to play an active role at the Cairo based law firm Kosheri Rashed & Riad law.

The Egyptian, Arab, African and the wider international arbitration community is deeply saddened by this loss, and we wish to extend our condolences and sincere prayers to his family, students and friends across the world during this mourning period.