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The Permanent Court of Arbitration - Description [2004] PICTRes 9 (29 March 2004)
The Permanent Court of Arbitration
The
Permanent Court of Arbitration was established by the Convention for
the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, concluded at The Hague
in 1899, and then revised by the second Hague Peace Conference in 1907.
That makes it one of the oldest international
institutions continuously
in existence, and surely the oldest one in the field of international
dispute settlement.
Despite its name, the PCA is neither permanent nor a proper court of justice.
Indeed, unlike properly called international
judicial bodies, the PCA
does not have a permanent bench, made of judges which have not been selected
by the
parties, and who apply pre-determined rules of procedure. All it
does is to provide states with a roster of potential arbitrators
(each
state party to the Conventions of 1899 and 1907 can designate up to four
arbitrators) to form an ad hoc
arbitral tribunal, and the logistic support
for it, by way of the only component of the PCA which is really permanent
(i.e., its secretariat, known as the International Bureau). In other words,
the Hague Conventions did not create
a court but rather a machinery for
setting up arbitral tribunals when the need arises.
The PCA lived a golden age in the years before World War I, when several
high profile cases were submitted to
arbitration. Its success inspired
various plans and proposals for the creation of truly permanent international
judicial bodies, eventually paving the way for the establishment of the
Permanent Court of International Justice. Fatally,
the PCIJ and the ICJ
overshadowed the PCA reducing its caseload to a trickle, first and then
hibernating it completely
after World War II.
It is only towards the beginning of the nineties that the PCA experienced
a thaw, when it gradually diversified
its services beyond the purely inter-State
disputes, situating itself at the juncture between public and private
international law. Nowadays, the PCA facilitates settlement of disputes
involving various combinations of states, private
parties and intergovernmental
organizations by way of arbitration, conciliation and fact-finding. It
offers flexible
rules of procedure, which are based upon the widely used
UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules as well as ad hoc rules for specific
kinds
of disputes, such as those pertaining to the environment and natural resource.
Data obtained from the Project on International Courts and Tribunals (PICT)
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