An Inaugural Reflection on the Evolving Challenges and Opportunities for Arbitration
THE AUTHORS:
Maximin de Fontmichel, Professor of Law, Director of the Master 2 – Arbitrage et Commerce International at Université Paris-Saclay, International Arbitrator at FAR-Fontmichel Arbitration Resolution, and Scientific Committee Member of GLAS Forum
Daniela de Avilez Demôro, International Arbitrator at DAD LaW Firm, Co-President of GLAS Forum, and Ph.D Candidate in Law at Angers University
On the 24th of March, 2026, during the tenth edition of Paris Arbitration Week, the Global Arbitration & Sustainability Forum — GLAS Forum — held its official launch at Jus Mundi’s headquarters in Paris. The event, entitled “Rethinking Dispute Resolution for a Changing Planet,” brought together academics, arbitration practitioners, corporate actors and sustainability professionals to examine how dispute resolution may respond to the legal, economic and scientific complexity of ESG-related disputes.
The significance of the event lies first in the announcement of a new forum for discussion and collaboration: GLAS Forum is an independent, non-profit initiative dedicated to the public interest and to rigorous, cross-disciplinary thinking on arbitration, mediation and global ESG-related challenges. Secondly, it lies in the important questions it placed before the arbitration community. International arbitration has long been valued for its consent-based legitimacy, procedural flexibility, confidentiality and ability to resolve complex commercial disputes across borders. Yet a new category of arbitrable disputes is emerging from sustainability transitions, global value chains, climate-related risks and contractual obligations linked to human rights and environmental protection. These disputes are growing in number and complexity and often involve interests that extend beyond the immediate contractual relationship. They may concern impacted communities, public policy choices, transnational supply chains, environmental harm and scientific evidence that does not fit neatly within traditional categories of private interests. Their emergence therefore calls on the arbitration community to prepare, both procedurally and substantively, for issues that are no longer marginal to arbitral practice.
These were the central themes of the GLAS Forum’s event.
Daniela de Avilez Demôro, Arbitrator and Co-President and founder of GLAS Forum, presented the forum as a space for collaboration and structured reflection on how alternative dispute resolution mechanisms may evolve in response to systemic transformations. She situated the initiative in a broader context of environmental change, social fragmentation, technological disruption, increasing scarcity and a growing number of disputes now emerging from sustainability transitions. In that setting, the question is no longer whether arbitration can remain useful, but whether its tools are sufficiently adapted to disputes not fully contemplated when many of its procedural mechanisms were established. This context suggests that some future disputes may force tribunals to confront the limits of a purely bilateral vision of contractual justice.
Maximin de Fontmichel, Professor of Law at Université Paris-Saclay and Director of the Master 2 Arbitrage et Commerce International, opened by situating arbitration in a position of deep ambivalence. Arbitration has long presented itself as the justice of the business world — efficient, confidential, shaped by and accountable to commercial actors, governed by the principle of pacta sunt servanda. And yet, the disputes now arising — involving environmental harms, supply chain abuses, the rights of communities — call for something else: a form of justice capable of looking beyond the transaction. Then he continued by framing questions around the arbitrator’s identity. Is the arbitrator solely the judge of the contract, appointed by the parties to decide the dispute submitted to them within the four corners of the parties’ agreement? Or can the arbitrator, in certain circumstances, be called upon to engage with broader social functions when the dispute involves environmental harm, value chains, communities or human rights concerns? The point was not to reject the classical conception of arbitration. Rather, it was to acknowledge that two legitimate and conflicting positions coexist within the arbitral community: those who hold that arbitration is the justice of the contract and will not go beyond it, and those willing to integrate public interest and third-party interests into the dispute. Can a private justice, rooted in party autonomy and consensual by nature, genuinely engage with matters of public interest? These are not comfortable questions for arbitration. But they are, necessary ones — and precisely the questions that GLAS Forum was created to ask.
The first roundtable, moderated by Solène Ringler, Law Professor and Vice-Dean for International Relations, University of Angers, focused on the interface between arbitration and human rights. Jean-Baptiste Racine, Law Professor, Paris-Panthéon-Assas University, identified an important channel through which human rights issues may enter arbitration. Corporate duty-of-care obligations are established to identify risks and prevent serious violations of human rights, fundamental freedoms, health and safety, and the environment arising from companies’ activities and those of certain subsidiaries, subcontractors and suppliers. These obligations are increasingly translated into contractual clauses, particularly in relation to international supply chains. When those contracts also contain arbitration agreements, related disputes will naturally fall before arbitral tribunals. In that sense, human rights are not necessarily external to arbitration. They may be “contractualized”, “privatized” and then adjudicated through arbitral procedure.
These legal developments do not automatically create arbitration disputes, but they help explain why contractual commitments linked to human rights and environmental governance are becoming more frequent and more consequential.
Moreover, two developments merit particular attention. The first is the Bangladesh Accord — now known as the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry — a transnational framework agreement concluded between trade unions and companies that includes an arbitration clause for related disputes. Arbitrations have already been conducted under this agreement at the initiative of trade unions, establishing an important precedent in the field of fundamental social rights. The second is the Hague Rules on Business and Human Rights Arbitration of December 2019, an arbitration framework entirely dedicated to human rights issues. While no cases have yet been formally registered under these rules, their adoption signals a call to practice that the arbitral community cannot ignore.
Racine’s key point was forward-looking. There may not yet be a fully stabilized arbitral practice in this field. But an emerging practice is visible, and precisely because it is emerging, the legal community should begin to develop the procedural and substantive tools needed to handle it. One of those tools is transparency. If arbitration becomes a forum for disputes involving human rights or social concerns, confidentiality cannot remain an unquestioned reflex. At the same time, transparency and confidentiality should not be treated as mutually exclusive. A more nuanced model is possible, allowing a degree of procedural openness while protecting legitimately confidential information.
Delphine Darmon brought a non-legal perspective grounded in corporate sustainability practice and global value chains. Her intervention reminded the audience that due diligence is not an abstract compliance vocabulary. It is a daily governance challenge involving fragmented chains of production, multiple intermediaries and difficult questions of responsibility. The examples discussed, including the cobalt and cocoa supply chains, illustrated how moral, legal, and contractual responsibility may diverge. This fragmentation raises one of the most difficult questions for arbitration. If a dispute is resolved only between two private parties, what place remains for the workers, communities or victims whose interests may be directly affected by the underlying facts?
This concern goes to the legitimacy of process. Arbitration’s strength lies in party autonomy. But ESG-related disputes may involve persons who are not parties to the arbitration agreement and yet are central to the factual and moral architecture of the dispute. The challenge is therefore not merely to decide whether such disputes are arbitrable. It is to design procedures capable of preserving consent-based adjudication while recognizing that some disputes carry externalities that cannot be ignored.
The second roundtable, moderated by Sandrine Clavel, Professor of Law at Université Paris-Saclay and former member of the Conseil supérieur de la magistrature, focused on the interface between environmental issues and arbitration. Jean-Philippe Ollier, drawing on his long industrial experience at Michelin, emphasized that companies cannot separate economic performance, competitiveness, environmental responsibility, supply chain management and stakeholder dialogue. For companies operating in complex industrial ecosystems, dispute prevention depends on systemic thinking. It requires early cooperation with suppliers, partners, competitors, public authorities and civil society actors, especially NGOs. In that sense, sustainability is not only a source of disputes. It is also a method of risk prevention.
Laurent Neyret, Sciences Po’s Law Professor, situated environmental law as a laboratory of legal transformation — one that has already reshaped civil liability, criminal law, and business law, and is now extending its reach into dispute resolution. Environmental disputes are not merely technical variants of ordinary commercial disputes. They present three defining characteristics. They are transdisciplinary, requiring scientific expertise across chemistry, physics, ecology and economics that no single legal practitioner can fully command. They are transnational, because pollution, value chains and environmental risks cross borders as freely as capital, raising questions of applicable law, jurisdiction and enforcement that resist purely bilateral resolution. And they are transgenerational because the consequences of environmental harm may extend far beyond the present parties and the present time — raising fundamental questions about who is entitled to a seat at the table and what forms of redress are proportionate. These characteristics carry direct implications for arbitration.
Environmental arbitration may require tribunals to engage with complex scientific evidence, multiple causal chains, dispersed responsibilities and difficult questions of quantum. The arbitral community may also need to follow the possible emergence of an international environmental public order and to think carefully about the recognition and enforcement of awards involving environmental issues. Existing tools already point in that direction. The Permanent Court of Arbitration has specialized environmental rules for arbitration and conciliation, including mechanisms connected to scientific and technical expertise.
Neyret’s closing reflection was particularly striking. He drew a parallel with subjects that arbitration once approached with caution, or even resistance, such as anti-money laundering, counterfeiting and counter-terrorism financing. These matters are now integrated into regular arbitral practice. Environmental and human rights disputes may follow a similar trajectory. They are not utopian or foreign to arbitration. They are already materializing and require preparation.
Geneviève Helleringer, Professor at Oxford University, concluded the event by emphasizing that the discussions were not intended to provide definitive answers. Their purpose was to open a demanding and structured field of reflection. That is perhaps the most accurate description of GLAS Forum’s first contribution. It does not propose to transform arbitration into public litigation. Nor does it suggest that arbitrators should abandon the contract. It invites the arbitration community to ask how private justice can remain legitimate when disputes are increasingly shaped by systemic risks, scientific complexity, collective externalities and global interdependence.
GLAS Forum’s inaugural conference showed that the question is no longer whether sustainability will affect arbitration. The real question is whether arbitration will be ready when these disputes arrive with full force.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Maximin de Fontmichel is Professor of Law at Université Paris-Saclay (“UVSQ”), where he directs the Master 2 – MACI, and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Geneva. Former member of the Paris and Madrid Bars, he acts as arbitrator and expert in complex domestic and international disputes. He holds a Ph.D from UVSQ, a Master’s degree in Private Law from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, an LL.M from McGill Faculty’s of Law, and a Licenciatura de derecho from Complutense University of Madrid. He was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School, and is the author of Weak Parties and Arbitration (2013) and co-author of the Code de l’arbitrage commenté (2nd edition – 2021). He is Co-Founder of the Global Arbitration & Sustainability Forum – GLAS Forum and a Founding Member of its Scientific Committee.
Daniela de Avilez Demôro is a Ph.D. Candidate in Law at Université d’Angers, where she also obtained a Master’s degree in Economic Law (Mention bien), and holds a Law degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (“PUC-Rio”). She also holds a Certificat Pratique de l’Arbitrage from Université Paris-Saclay (“UVSQ” / Mention bien). Daniela is an international arbitrator, with over 30 years of experience across multinational corporations, the public sector and the non-profit sector, having served as special adviser, board member, law firm partner, general counsel and C-level executive. She has led complex domestic and international arbitration proceedings for over 15 years and is a member of the Brazilian Bar, Rio de Janeiro Section, since 1992. She is currently listed as an arbitrator before Brazilian arbitral institutions, and she is Co-Founder and Co-President of the Global Arbitration & Sustainability Forum – GLAS Forum.
*The views and opinions expressed by authors are theirs and do not necessarily reflect those of their organizations, employers, or Daily Jus, Jus Mundi, or Jus Connect.
