Confidentiality is unanimously recognized to be one of the most characteristic and attractive features of international commercial arbitration. The confidential character of arbitral proceedings has often been presumed on the basis of the privacy of the hearings, but this presumption has proven ill-founded in arbitrations between private and public actors ("mixed arbitration"). National courts and international tribunals have come to recognize and to enforce a public interest exception to confidentiality based on the principle that the public has a right to be informed of the contents and outcome of the arbitral proceedings whenever the subject-matter of the dispute is of public concern. This thesis will assess the basis upon which and the limits within which the public interest exception to confidentiality might operate. The thesis will then provide an analysis of the benefits—the accommodation of moral and legal expectations of public participation—and risks—the politicization of the arbitrated dispute and disclosure of trade secrets—of greater transparency and openness in mixed arbitral proceedings. The thesis will show that the public interest exception to confidentiality is a valuable and important development along the path of democratic governance, but also that, in order to avoid the indiscriminate disclosure of information, the precise range of its application needs to be carefully defined and limited to only those cases wherein it appears to be fully justified.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.19633 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Chirichiello, Michela |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Laws (Institute of Comparative Law) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002022516, Theses scanned by McGill Library. |
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