Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am sure that you are all eager to be introduced to our new baby, particularly as today we have the privilege of making its acquaintance in advance, since it will not see the light of day, officially, until the dawn of 1998. But, you will ask me, why keep it in the family until 1998? Before presenting it to you, and especially before boasting of its qualities, it seemed appropriate to reveal it gradually to help it to be better understood and, hopefully, make it wanted. In addition, as you will readily understand, the new Rules will also have to be translated into several languages and many copies will need to be printed to ensure their wide and speedy distribution.

1998 will also be the 75th anniversary of the International Court of Arbitration. The entry into force of the new Rules will present an opportunity for celebrating and commemorating this event even more meaningfully.

Since I am talking to you about a new baby, I might add that it enjoys the special distinction of having two mothers, namely, the Court and the Commission. We can say this all the more easily in French, which divides its nouns between masculine and feminine genders, since both the Court and the Commission belong to the latter group. This reference, alas, does not work so well in English, which is why I chose to give my speech originally in French. In fact, the new Rules underwent a somewhat complicated gestation; and because of this I have asked Mrs Livanos Cattaui to speak to us about the structure of the International Chamber of Commerce as such.

No doubt, you are all familiar with the mechanisms of the International Court of Arbitration and its procedures. The Court is international in scope, particularly as a result of its members' origins. Moreover, since it has the capacity to deal with disputes of every type, its scope is also universal. Once they have been appointed by the ICC National Committee of their country of origin, the members of the Court become and remain totally independent of that country.

The Commission on International Arbitration, on the other hand, has different characteristics. It is a technical group, just like the fifteen or so other ICC commissions which operate in fields ranging from transport, through taxation, to the banking sector. So far as our Commission is concerned, its first task is to take an interest in and promote solutions for the settlement of disputes that are appropriate to international trade, in particular by means of arbitration. The Commission is made up of delegates from different countries where the ICC is represented by a National Committee or by direct members. Thus the Commission's delegates are members of a National Committee in their country of origin, and this committee, in its turn, has its own arbitration commission at the local level, which is responsible for drawing up its own position papers. These are then collated and presented here at the Commission at its plenary meetings, hence in a truly international environment.

Unlike the members of the Court, the national delegates who are involved in the activities of the Commission on International Arbitration represent the interests of their respective National Committees.

These representatives come to the Commission charged by their own National Committee with the task of defending a particular point of view or asserting a position there. Very often these representatives, as well as the other people who attend the Commission's meetings regularly, are also able to provide the Commission with the benefit of their experience as practitioners in the field of international arbitration, whether as arbitrators, lawyers or users.

Accordingly, throughout the course of our work, we were confronted by two opposing forces. Finally, the adoption of the amended version of the ICC Rules of Arbitration provided a point of convergence where the two forces could be reconciled on an equal footing.

On the one hand, the members of the Court, who are independent of the National Committees, are responsible for applying the Rules; as such, they are the first to identify solutions that can be provided by the Rules that are appropriate for resolving problems posed by international arbitration, problems that are becoming ever more difficult at the procedural level. They are more aware than anyone of the difficulties inherent in the application of the ICC Rules of Arbitration. Naturally, they also appreciate their flexibility and adaptability, which have enabled them to build up a body of 'case law' solutions over the years capable of resolving totally new difficulties stemming from new (or even modern) trends in international arbitration, as well as from users' increasingly sophisticated knowledge.

On the other hand, practitioners - which the members of the Commission generally are - subject to the constraints of the cases or the business communities in which they revolve, defend viewpoints that are often at odds with the opinions of the people responsible for applying the Rules. These practitioners are aware of both the gaps in international arbitration and its merits; they see new arbitration centres burgeoning in all four corners of the world, which - depending on their resources - are trying to expand by vaunting their own particular characteristics. They are also in a position to compare the growing number of arbitration regulations or rules, rules which, very often in the past few years, have been modified, adapted and modernized.

Today, at the end of almost three years' work, our new baby is born as the culmination of a variety of different currents which militated in favour of changes in the present Rules. These changes have been made not only on the initiative of the members of the Court, but also at the instigation of the national representatives who took part in the Commission meetings and its Working Party, which was responsible for updating the Rules. The first initiative for amending the Rules was instigated by the Court itself and its former chairman, Alain Plantey, who felt that it was essential to have a means for facilitating the settlement of a number of problems that were cropping up at increasingly frequent intervals. However, it was the Commission that was responsible for the scale of the revision, which, in fact, was far more extensive than the Court's original concerns.

Hence, when the time came for defining in precise terms the extent of the revision to be undertaken by the Commission, a number of questions were raised. Should the revision consist merely of modifications in response to the Court's immediate concerns, or should it constitute an in-depth 'remake' so as to provide the ICC Rules of Arbitration with the most modern or even avant-garde provisions? In addition, the question of the definition of 'modernism' in a field like international arbitration had to be agreed on.

While it is true that all the members of the Court are ex officio members of the Commission, and that a number of them are also international arbitration practitioners, the fact remains nonetheless that it is not always easy to reconcile their viewpoints with the stands adopted by the National Committees, as these are often dictated by purely local traditions and experiences. The presentations that follow will give you a clearer insight into these various difficulties.

It should be pointed out that the ICC Rules of Arbitration have been in existence ever since 1923. Certain people know them virtually by heart, while others are far less familiar with them, particularly in the regions of the world that are barely starting to open their doors to international commercial arbitration. For example, in Canada, a country that I know well, only 20 or 25 years ago arbitration was deemed to be an infringement of public policy, because the award was meant to be final; in any case, this was true in Quebec. The penetration of ICC arbitration in Canada is relatively recent. Accordingly, the question at issue was whether to change the current Rules in their entirety, to satisfy the modernist trend, or whether, to the contrary, the revision should be limited solely to the changes that the Court deemed essential, on the ground that at the outset this would give the numerous firms located in far-off regions time to familiarize themselves with the mechanisms of ICC arbitration.

The solution that was finally adopted was a middle course: to preserve the spirit and structure of the ICC Rules of Arbitration while modernizing their provisions and making their time-limits less inflexible. There is no doubt that these Rules contain particular features which make them unique, such as the composition of the Court, the nomination of arbitrators by ICC National Committees across the world, the terms of reference and the scrutiny of draft awards. I think that today the goal fixed on has been achieved: ICC arbitration still contains characteristics of its own, but from now on it will be more user-friendly and offer greater foreseeability. The Commission on International Arbitration has succeeded in its task, and naturally the Court played a leading role in this. Several of its members took an active part in the activities of the Working Party, which was chaired by Yves Derains, a former Secretary General of the Court, and whose Vice-Chairman was Stephen Bond, also a former Secretary General of the Court.

However, and you will become aware of this as the day progresses, the Court did not reach the same conclusions as the Commission on every point and was slightly reluctant to accept the draft amended Rules as adopted by the Commission in their entirety. The discrepancies, which in the end related to only two points, were finally settled by the ICC Council, the Organization's highest-ranking body, to which both the Court and the Commission are attached. During the last ICC Congress at Shanghai, on 7 April 1997, the Council arbitrated between the Court's wishes and the stand taken by the Commission. Today, for the first time, the International Chamber of Commerce is presenting its new Rules of Arbitration in the form that will come into force at the beginning of next year. Having briefly described the context in which the Commission's activities, in interaction with the Court, took place, I am now going to hand over to Mr Yves Derains who is known, if not by all, at least to the great majority of you. I first met Mr. Derains in 1974 when he was Secretary General of the Court; for my part, I was then the Court's Canadian member.

Hence, Mr Derains was also involved in the previous in-depth revision of the ICC Rules of Arbitration, adopted in 1975; I, too, was associated in that revision. Mr Derains will present to you in greater detail the objectives sought over the past three years in drawing up the 1998 version of the ICC Rules of Arbitration, or, if you wish, our new baby.