THE AUTHOR:
Raquel Macedo Moreira, Independent Practitioner, Research Associate & Lecturer
The pre-conference paper promised that this year’s edition of the Italian Arbitration Day (“IAD“) would be a deep dive into international arbitration in the age of tariffs, sanctions and global uncertainty. Rome delivered.
On 11 June 2026, participants and panellists gathered in the Sala della Protomoteca of the Campidoglio for the 5th Italian Arbitration Day, organised by AIA (Associazione Italiana per l’Arbitrato) and CAM (Milan Chamber of Arbitration).
Maria Beatrice Deli, AIA’s Secretary General, opened the day by quoting Virgil’s Aeneid: the epic poem of a civilisation rebuilding itself from ruins. An apt prologue for a day spent asking what happens to international arbitration when the order it was designed to service begins to fracture. Andrea Carlevaris, AIA’s President, noted IAD’s unprecedented numbers: 225+ registrations, 25 sponsors, and 15 side events. Stefano Azzali, CAM’s Director General, welcomed participants and enforced IAD’s tradition that no speaker shall be introduced. We just dived right into the discussions.
Two Professors, One Question
The morning opened with two keynote speeches that approached this year’s theme from different angles.
Carlo Altomonte, Professor of Economics at Bocconi University, addressed the themes from an economic perspective. He proposed that, if we accept that we are living through a period of framework change, comparable to the end of the Cold War and the beginning of globalisation, then wars are expected. Altomonte relied on an economic explanation as to why this is happening. The US has accumulated a large negative international investment position. When this becomes too extreme, financial crises often follow. The US has avoided default because the world depends on the dollar, but this boosts asset prices faster than wages, widening the wealth gap and fueling political instability that influences policy responses. He argued that the tariff regime is less about trade and more about deliberately creating chaos. Despite the headlines, world trade has actually grown, and the tariffs directly touch only a small share of it. The real purpose of this chaos is to serve as leverage in specific negotiations. In his view, globalisation is not ending. The economic ties built over many years cannot be undone overnight, and global trade routes adapt rather than collapse.
Alain Pellet, Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris Nanterre and former Chair of the UN International Law Commission, offered the legal counterpart in the form of what he described as a list of platitudes. Pellet acknowledged that international law has been said to be in a state of permanent crisis for sixty years. What is different now is the accumulation and the ruthlessness. He pointed out that the time for ambitious multilateral treaties has passed and a treaty like the Marrakesh Agreement would not have been concluded today. International institutions are weakening. ICJ (International Court of Justice) decisions are increasingly disregarded by losing states. The WTO appellate body has been paralysed by the US refusal to nominate members. And states are no longer even bothering to construct elaborate legal justifications for the use of force. He said, however, that sovereignty is not an absolute concept, but an international legal one. States need international law precisely because they are equal. The alternative is an empire, governed by force. If the current trajectory continues, he said, we are heading toward an unstable coexistence of competing imperial ambitions. The task is, therefore, not to celebrate the existing order uncritically but to resist the forces that would dissolve it entirely, such as nationalism, populism or unilateralism.
Panel I — What Disputes?
The morning panel, moderated by Michele Potestà, took as its starting point the question of what kinds of disputes are actually emerging from this landscape.
Constantine Partasides opened on political risk and investment contracts. The new age of volatility is bringing a wave of force majeure claims, hardship arguments, and change-in-circumstances analyses, reactivating clauses that had sat dormant for decades. ISDS, he noted, is under attack from multiple directions simultaneously. Jan Paulsson’s mid-1990s description of discovering a new land of investment protection now sits in an uncomfortable position: the instrument designed to manage political risk is itself under political attack, accused of illegitimacy and of removing sovereign regulatory choices from national adjudication. His response was practical: if ISDS is changing or retreating, contract-based arbitration must pick up more weight. And stabilisation clauses are evolving accordingly. The freezing clauses that were once locked in a legal framework at the date of the contract are giving way to equilibrium clauses, meaning those that acknowledge that the law will change but require compensation for the consequences of that change. The aftermath of this, he observed, is significant, because if economic equilibrium is the standard, there is in principle no ceiling on what can be claimed as compensation.
Aurélia Antonietti brought new ICSID (International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes) data to the discussion, previewing a forthcoming paper on contract-based arbitrations. Her figures show that, compared with treaty-based cases, contract claims are more likely to succeed, conclude more quickly, and award a larger share of the damages claimed. The overall message is clear: contract-based arbitration at ICSID is not a marginal category but an increasingly important one, with features that differ markedly from the headline treaty cases that usually attract practitioners’ attention. She also addressed sanctions in ISDS. She noted that multilateral sanctions and unilateral regimes can operate under different legal bases and with different extraterritorial reach. What is new, however, is not the interaction of sanctions with arbitral proceedings, as that has existed for years, but the emergence of sanctions themselves as a cause of action. As examples, she cited ABH Holdings v. Ukraine, EMIS Finance B.V. v. Ukraine, CTF Holdings v. Ukraine, and Igor Makarov v. Canada. The question of whether arbitration is the appropriate forum for such disputes, or whether it risks being weaponised as an instrument of geopolitical pressure, was raised and left deliberately open.
Turgut Aycan Özcan addressed cryptocurrency disputes. The market has grown to trillions of dollars and the disputes have followed: contractual claims arising from smart contracts and initial coin offerings, fraud and security breaches, regulatory compliance disputes, and exchange-consumer disagreements over liquidation practices and fees. He made a case for arbitration as the natural forum on the basis of procedural flexibility, confidentiality, enforceability under the New York Convention (1958), and party autonomy over governing law. He acknowledged, however, two categories of difficulty: criminal and regulatory violations being largely excluded, and questions of capacity to arbitrate remaining live in consumer contexts. The global regulatory picture he mapped is genuinely fragmented. China prohibits cryptocurrency and has set aside awards to be paid in bitcoin on the basis that it is not recognised as legal tender. Hong Kong has moved in the exact opposite direction, with the HKIAC (Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre) actively expanding its capacity for crypto disputes. SIAC (Singapore International Arbitration Centre) has taken a similarly proactive position. Turkey passed comprehensive legislation in 2024 establishing an arbitrability framework. The EU operates through its consumer-protection overlay. This is a disputes category in formation, with institutions and jurisdictions competing to shape the default framework.
The Morning Reverse Debate
Valentine Chessa’s reverse debate turned the room into the substantive arena.
From the audience, Marco Padovan spoke on the practical navigation of competing sanctions regimes, noting that although the EU’s regime is formally territorial, its practical effects are increasingly extraterritorial, and universal criminal jurisdiction is expanding.
Benedetta Mauro discussed her doctoral research on unexpected contract events, emphasising internal disruptions often overlooked: technological changes causing internal uncertainty, such as contract obsolescence during execution. A context in which terms like “best efforts” do not remove the risk. As a result, the arbitrators’ focus shifts from evaluating compliance to assessing the parties’ good faith within the process.
Federico Euforbio raised the question of arbitrability, referencing Article 11 of the EU Regulation 833/2014 (Russia sectoral sanctions). He cited Advocate General Andrea Biondi’s February 2026 conclusions confirming that arbitration of such disputes is permissible, but pose a fair question: if Article 11 is part of public policy and domestic courts must apply it ex officio, do we really want an empty shadow arbitration in which the outcome is fixed?
Galina Zukova discussed the practical impact of sanctions on enforcement. She cited a March 2026 Swiss court decision denying enforcement of an award against a sanctioned entity due to statutory impossibility, a decision later reversed by the federal court, which saw enforcement as deferred rather than permanently barred. She described an ICC (International Chamber of Commerce) case where a claim was denied because the contract was terminated after sanctions, despite advance payments. She also noted South Africa’s interim measures as the only practical exception to enforcement paralysis for sanctioned parties.
Finally, Niuscha Bassiri closed the reverse debate on the constitution of tribunals, observing that, a decade ago, the nationality of an arbitrator was largely a formality in commercial arbitration. Not anymore. There is now a question about what nationality means for independence and impartiality in a world where the geopolitical identity of a passport matters again, and she is currently working on an IBA task force examining it. The question of how to think “outside the box in a way that arbitration can evolve”, her phrasing, does not yet have a settled answer.
Afternoon: A View from IAD’s Partners
Carolyn Lamm, presenting on behalf of ICCA, announced the launch of the Italian version of ICCA’s Guide to the Interpretation of the 1958 New York Convention. She also introduced the ICCA Report No. 8 of the Cross-Institutional Task Force on Gender Diversity in Arbitral Appointments and Proceedings. The headline figure, which she offered as both progress and a reminder of how much remains to be done: women’s representation in arbitral appointments has roughly doubled over the past decade, from approximately 11% to 22%. The party-appointment gap remains the central structural problem. Parties continue to appoint women at significantly lower rates than institutions, which means that awareness campaigns directed at institutions, while valuable, are insufficient.
Panel II — What Remedies?
The afternoon panel, moderated by Andrea Carlevaris, asked a hard question: given the disputes ahead, what can arbitral tribunals actually do?
Olena Perepelynska brought her views, drawing from her experience in Ukraine. Ukraine’s civil law framework, she noted, contains a hardship provision that closely tracks the UNIDROIT Principles. The rebus sic stantibus doctrine exists and is available. But it is difficult to apply. Unforeseeability is the hardest element to establish. In the context of import and export restrictions arising from wartime conditions, Ukrainian courts have found termination of contracts easier to grant than adjustment of their terms. The doctrine and the remedy exist, the standard of proof is high, and English law, she added, will produce very different outcomes for parties who made that choice of governing law.
Alberto Fortún mapped the structural tension facing arbitral tribunals when the underlying project has gone off course. A contractor who wants to continue work may find that the tribunal lacks the power to order suspension. A party seeking exceptional onerosity as a remedy may find the contract’s specific language forecloses it. He raised the question of timing: if a contractor seeks to have a contract terminated on grounds of economic disruption, does termination take effect at the time of the relevant event or the time of the award? The answer matters significantly for what compensation looks like. Another pointed observation was about arbitral powers: under Article 48 of the English Arbitration Act 1996, tribunals have broad remedial authority by default, including the power to order specific performance and to “rectify documents”. In jurisdictions where those default powers do not exist, the parties must have explicitly conferred them in the arbitration agreement. The practical lesson he drew was threefold: contracts need to define the framework for imprevision claims with specificity, not leave it to general doctrine; there must be a mechanism for settling claims during performance, not only at the end; and arbitration agreements should expressly empower the tribunal to exercise the remedial authority the situation may require.
Hamed Hassan Merah addressed remedies in Middle Eastern jurisdictions, with particular focus on Saudi Arabia. He corrected what he described as a persistent misconception. The Saudi Civil Transactions Law confirms that loss of profits is available as a remedy. Saudi courts have historically been more cautious (a 2018 annulment proceeding saw a loss of profits claim rejected), but a July 2025 court decision awarded loss of profits where defective performance had caused a party to cancel a commercial transaction, with the court confirming that such damages are available where there are actual consequences of the breach. He also addressed liquidated damages, noting that they are often said to be unrecognisable under Sharia, but the Saudi framework permits them, subject to a dividing line between amounts that genuinely compensate for a contractual breach and those that function as penalties. In an analysis of approximately 3,000 Saudi court judgments, annulment rates for liquidated damages provisions were approximately 8.3%. The picture that emerges from this is of a jurisdiction in transition, more hospitable to international arbitration practice than its reputation sometimes suggests.
The Afternoon Reverse Debate
Gabriele Ruscalla managed the afternoon audience discussion.
On force majeure standards, Elena Fontanelli gave a detailed account from the audience of an ICC arbitration where the claimant relied on a strict reading, and the respondent on a reasonableness standard, and the tribunal applied Article 79 of the UN Convention on the International Sale of Goods (CISG) (1980) in a manner that deliberately preserved its ambiguity. The takeaway: when invoking force majeure, do not wait for the tribunal to resolve the doctrinal question. Establish whether a reasonable party in your position, at the time of contracting, could have anticipated the disruption.
On sanctions-related investment claims, Valerio Salvatori described the situation of an individual investor who was eventually removed from a sanctions list, but not before their business operations were substantially disrupted by the period of designation. The possibility of converting that period of harm into a treaty claim, depending on what the applicable treaty covers, was noted as an area where practitioners should be thinking proactively.
On sports arbitration, Luca Beffa discussed CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport) jurisprudence. He mentioned the CAS decision to exclude Russian athletes and FIFA’s concern that their participation could threaten competition. He also noted the ISC’s solution to allow neutral athletes if they didn’t support the Ukraine conflict. He spoke of how CAS overturned broad bans on Russian clubs and athletes based only on nationality, as those exclusions could be seen as discriminatory. The focus on equality showed conflicts like Ukraine are not unique, requiring consistent principles. This illustrates that the boundary between political sanctions and sports governance is increasingly blurred.
Closing
The pre-conference paper asked whether arbitration remains a reliable anchor in a world that has lost its faith in multilateralism, or whether we are witnessing something more troubling. Having been in the room, I am not sure the day resolved the question. I am convinced, though, that it confirmed the question is the right one. IAD’s discussion confirmed that arbitration sits at the intersection of structural disruption and institutional decay. Not passively, though: the Sala della Protomoteca was not full of people who have concluded that arbitration has failed as a stabiliser, but it was full of people who are working, case by case, rule by rule, clause by clause, to ensure that it does not.
Marcus Aurelius, from the courtyard outside, had nothing to add.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Raquel Macedo Moreira is a triple-qualified lawyer in Brazil, Italy, and England and Wales. Her professional journey includes several years of practice in top-tier law firms, alongside academic work. Currently, Raquel runs her own practice as a lawyer and arbitrator. She is also a research associate at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, and an adjunct lecturer at Université Libre de Bruxelles.
*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.
