What a pleasure! At last the Institute is resuming its publications, a tradition successfully established by the ICC Institute's founder, Professor Pierre Lalive. We intend to publish yearly the proceedings of our Annual General Meeting, as well as a second publication, the best of. We will in our regular programmes

- PIDAs and IAAPs - select for publication certain of the papers submitted by our speakers. Of course, all of them are good, but we shall try to offer a range of studies covering topics of interest - particularly current ones.

Our first publication is therefore devoted to our November 2002 Annual General Meeting. "Arbitration, money laundering, corruption and fraud" was approved by the Institute Council as a topic and we decided to set up a working group to study this very delicate question. When the group, led by Andrew

W.A. Berkeley and Kristine Karsten, including Bernardo Cremades and Antonio Crivellaro, presented the results of their reflections, the Council found the matter so rich and dense that we all agreed to dedicate the next Annual Meeting, the most prestigious annual event of the Institute, to this matter. Indeed, it would have been a pity not to spread the ideas expressed by this group, as this knowledge and expertise had to be shared and publicized. In addition to these valuable speakers from the group, we decided to call on "external" prestigious experts: Alan Jenkins, Mark Pieth, Giorgio Sacerdoti, Arthur Harverd and Allan Philip. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them all for the remarkable work they did, and the tremendous input they gave to this Annual Meeting.

One of the aims of this conference was to create doctrine, rather than merely to compile information that already existed. We found that the papers and discussions centered around the duty of the arbitrator when money laundering is suspected, the duty of the parties, but also duty to society in general. Laws today tend to implicate lawyers in the reporting of not only offenses which clearly have been committed, but also suspected offenses. This raises the fundamental question of the freedom of the lawyer and of the arbitrator. Is counsel to report somebody coming to him for advice? Is the arbitrator, entrusted with a sacred mission of rendering an award, bound to report a case if he has only a suspicion that something is wrong? These are essential questions in the society of today and I am certain that you will find the answer in the present publication - may I repeat, our first in a long time.

I am convinced it will throw new light on the subject, and hope that every reader will enjoy these pages as much as we enjoyed working on them.

I look forward to meeting all of you, readers and speakers, at our 23rd Annual General Meeting, which will be held on 1 December 2003 in Paris on the topic of "Arbitration and oral evidence."