Originally from: ASA Special Series No. 43 Confidential and Restricted Access Information in International Arbitration

Preview Page

“The more keepers I have, the less I am kept… What am I”?

One of my children recently came home with this riddle. Without knowing it, she provided me with the perfect opening to this foreword. Children’s riddles often contain more than a little truth; this one more than many, for the answer is: “a secret”.

We live in an age where there is much talk and print about the “end of privacy”, where we fear or even experience ever-growing snooping (be it of the governmental variety or other), where a whisper at one end of the world is instantly transformed into a shout at the other, where the enchanted word “transparency” has achieved a level of saintliness that is usually reserved for divine revelation. At the same time legislators across the globe—in both democratic and illiberal jurisdictions—are issuing ever-more regulations that cloak certain types of information in a shroud of secrecy and restrict the transmission among citizens and businesses of other kinds of data. International arbitration is not shielded from these technological, societal and legal transformations.  Whether one applauds or bemoans this state of affairs, it remains a fact that it poses a brace of challenges to the arbitral process.