Introduction

6.1 International commercial transactions and disputes are increasingly multi-party in nature, and a significant number of disputes referred to arbitration involve more than two parties.1 Multi-party scenarios include both situations in which all parties are bound by the same arbitration agreement(s) and are involved in the arbitration proceedings since the beginning, and situations in which the procedural complexity is compounded by the fact that: (1) the dispute arises out of more than one contract, possibly containing multiple arbitration agreements; (2) an additional party is joined in the proceedings after the filing of the request for arbitration; or (3) the multi-party scenario results from the consolidation of two or more already pending arbitrations.2 All these situations are generally also described as ‘complex arbitrations’.3 Some procedural issues, such as the constitution of the arbitral tribunal and the allocation of the advance on the costs of the proceedings, are common to all multi-party cases, others are specific to certain categories of multi-party cases (ie multi-contract cases, joinders and consolidations).