Originally from World Arbitration And Mediation Review (WAMR)

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New Arbitration Rules for the Stockholm

Chamber of Commerce
By Marie Öhrström*

I. INTRODUCTION
Over the past few decades, the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm
Chamber of Commerce (SCC Institute) has emerged as one of the leading
arbitration institutions in the world and handles about 140 new cases per
year. More than half of the cases have an international character and
involve parties from more than 30 different countries. In order to provide
the users with an efficient, up-to-date, and easily comprehensible set of
rules, the SCC Institute has adopted new arbitration rules (“New Rules”).1
Since the 1999 version of the rules (“Rules”) was considered to be
modern and well-suited for international commercial arbitration, there was
no need to completely rewrite the Rules. It was felt, however, that the
Rules, in some respects, could be further improved to make them more
comprehensive and correspond to recent developments in international
commercial arbitration, and to clarify certain provisions that, in practice,
proved to require clarification or modification.
A revision committee2 was entrusted with the task of drafting the New
Rules. In September 2006, the committee presented a draft of the New
Rules which was distributed to a number of Swedish and foreign experts
who were invited to submit comments. The New Rules entered into force
on January 1, 2007.
II. NEW FEATURES OF THE RULES
The structure of the Rules has been somewhat amended and the New
Rules are more transparent and clarify which body within the SCC Institute
– the Board or the Secretariat – carries out which of the various tasks.