EU Law and Procedural Autonomy in International Commercial Arbitration

This article examines the impact of EU law in international commercial arbitration. EU law has become increasingly relevant in the world of commercial arbitration and while this may not at first seem to be a problem, this article argues that EU law has a distinctive nature which makes it fundamentally incompatible with the arbitral legal order. In effect, the EU legal order has developed on the basis of a direct trilateral relationship between disputes involving EU law, national courts and the European Court. When we are concerned with ordinary judicial proceedings, this relationship is classically supported by the ‘principle of effectiveness’ identified in the case-law of the European Court, which requires national procedures to enable individuals to bring claims based on EU law. Crucially, however, the procedural demands that could be made by the EU legal order are limited by the twin ‘principle of national procedural autonomy’, meaning the Court refrains from directly prescribing modalities for access to national courts and leaves discretion for States to set procedures. Contrasting with this analytical framework, it is here argued that once claims based on EU law fall within the sphere of arbitration, the principle of national procedural autonomy is inoperative and the EU legal order can dictate the terms of review. It is submitted that the effectiveness of EU law is assured not by the standard principle of effectiveness but by the principle of effective judicial protection, thus securing the procedural primacy of EU law in the arbitral legal order.