At its 29th session held in June, the U.N. Commission on International Trade Law adopted "UNCITRAL Notes on Organizing Arbitral Proceedings." The Notes set out an annotated checklist of issues that arbitrators and parties may wish to consider as they organize the arbitral proceedings. The UNCITRAL session also reviewed a progress report on its study of legislative implementation of the 1958 U.N. Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards. The session did not have before it proposals for future work in the field of international arbitration.

Copies of the UNCITRAL Notes may be obtained from UNCITRAL, Vienna International Centre, P.O. Box 500, A-1400 Vienna, Austria (Fax 43-1-237485).

UNCITRAL Notes

The UNCITRAL Notes do not recommend any particular procedure or express judgments on whether a particular practice is good. As the Notes themselves emphasize, disregard of the Notes is not to be deemed a violation of any procedural principles.

Although adopted by consensus at the 1996 UNCITRAL session, the Notes were not without controversy. Following the 1992 proposal that the U.N. Commission prepare "Guidelines for prehearing conferences," prominent European arbitrators criticized the attempt to "judicialize" arbitral proceedings. In particular, Professor Philippe Fouchard of France and Pierre Lalive of Switzerland wrote trenchant criticisms of the proposal.

The 1994 Congress of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration in Vienna considered the UNCITRAL project under the topic of "planning efficient proceedings." The proceedings of the ICCA Congress have recently been published.

Implementing the New York Convention

Working in cooperation with Committee D of the International Bar Association, the UNCITRAL Secretariat is preparing a study of how States party to the New York Convention have incorporated the Convention into national legislation. The study hopes to identify whether parties have modified the Convention s uniform rules on the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards.

The Secretariat has circulated a questionnaire to States party to the Convention. As of the June 1996 UNCITRAL session, however, only 32 of 108 States had replied. When sufficient replies have been received, the Secretariat will prepare a note for the Commission.