Former Supreme Court judge Justice Rohinton Nariman said on Saturday thst if India wanted to become a hub for international arbitration, the present system of having a single-judge first to hear arbitration cases should be done away with.
He said that when a person challenged an arbitral award, he should go straight to a Division Bench, which should again be a specialised Division Bench dealing with such matters. The arbitration cases should then be taken up expeditiously and disposed of.
Once this was done, this place would really become a hub for international arbitration, he added.
Delivering the keynote address at a session of the Delhi Arbitration Weekend, hosted by the Delhi International Arbitration Center (DIAC) of the Delhi High Court in collaboration with the Apex Court, Justice Nariman said that he has been making this suggestion for years, although it has not been taken seriously yet.
They have amended the Arbitration Act and the number of times, but they did not seem to take seriously the suggestion that the single-judge state should be removed altogether.
There should be no-single judge in arbitration cases, he added.
Justice Nariman said he has been in a state of bliss for the last two-and-a-half years since he has retired from the Supreme Court.
Once a person was out of that great institution, that bliss rarely got disturbed, except when sometimes he was asked to give speeches like this, because it took them back to their good old or bad old days when they were so flooded with work that there was little else a person could do.
The main focus of Justice Nariman’s speech was on two judgments from the Singapore Court of Appeal, namely the cases of Republic of India v Deutsche Telekom and Anupam Mittal v. Westbridge Ventures.
He discussed the various approaches taken in foreign jurisdictions when it came to enforcement of arbitral awards or enforcement of judgments setting aside arbitral awards.
Justice Nariman observed that in such matters, Indian courts usually looked at the relevant arbitration conventions closely, examined the other country’s views on convention and then arrived at their decisions on law and facts.
He said the only problem with the adjudication of arbitration cases in India was the amount of time taken during the process.