2026 PAW: Neutrality and Efficiency in Arbitration: New Dimensions in a Shifting Geopolitical Landscape

2026 PAW: Neutrality and Efficiency in Arbitration: New Dimensions in a Shifting Geopolitical Landscape

The 10^th edition of Paris Arbitration Week (“PAW”) saw no shortage of ambitious panels, but the one hosted by Dyakin, Gortsunyan and Partners tackled what may be the most pressing question facing the field right now: what do neutrality and efficiency actually mean in a world reshaped by sanctions, geopolitical fracture and steady rise of Russia-related disputes? Entitled “The New Dimensions of Neutrality and Efficiency in Arbitration in the Current Geopolitical Environment”, the session drew on perspectives from France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Russia and Asia to probe whether the assumptions underpinning international arbitration still hold.

The panel was co-moderated by Vladimir Petriskov and Vsevolod Taraskin (Dyakin, Gortsunyan and Partners), with guest speakers Sabrina Ainouz (Squire Patton Boggs), Jane Davies Evans KC (KC, 3VB), Tamir Livschitz (5Gambit Disputes) and Kunal Vajani (Chambers of Kunal Vajani).

Neutrality Reconsidered: The French Approach 

Ainouz set the tone by recalling that international arbitration has long rested on two fundamental assumptions: neutrality – political, procedural and legal – and efficiency, measured by speed, finality and enforceability. The trouble, she noted, is that both now operate in a markedly different environment, one shaped by the politicization of legal relationships and the rapid spread of sanctions regimes across jurisdictions.  

On neutrality in particular, Ainouz argued that the concept has become increasingly perceptual and contextual. It no longer operates solely at the level of the individual arbitrator's independence and impartiality; it extends to the seat and to the arbitration framework. To illustrate how French courts are navigating this terrain, she pointed to the Akhmetov v. Russia proceedings and the associated challenge before French courts as a concrete example of how the perception of bias standard and the reasonable doubt test are being applied with heightened scrutiny in politically sensitive disputes. The French approach retains its objective character, she noted, but the threshold for what constitutes a reasonable doubt is being pushed in new directions when Russian-related disputes are at issue.  

From a practical perspective, Ainouz stressed that arbitrators need to be more attentive than ever to public statements made by their firms, as well as to how their social media presence reads during pending cases. For counsel, the takeaway was equally clear: review the arbitrator's public profile early, and raise any challenges in good time, bearing in mind the French waiver doctrine (under which a party that fails to raise a challenge promptly loses the right to do so). Petriskov raised the question of whether universal institutional guidance on arbitrator appointments might be possible in this environment. Ainouz responded that it was – and that several institutions, including through ICC Commission reports, are already doing the groundwork.

The No-Claims Provisions: UK and Swiss Perspectives 

To understand where no-claims provisions stand today, Davies Evans took the panel back to their origins: the UN and EU measures adopted in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Those early instruments, she noted, were accompanied by unusually detailed policy thinking, covering questions such as burden of proof and whether the prohibition was meant to be permanent or temporary. That reasoning, she observed, is largely absent from more recent regulations, which have reproduced the same language without revisiting why it was drafted that way in the first place.  

The House of Lords’ decision in Shanning settled the core question for the English courts: the no-claims provision operates as permanent prohibition. Once sanctions are in place, the claim is extinguished, not merely suspended. Petriskov pressed on whether parties might at least secure a declaratory award acknowledging the debt and confirming liability – something with suspended effect that would preserve the claim until sanctions are lifted and stop limitation periods from running in the meantime. Evans’ response was that Shanning left little room for even that, though she acknowledged that the Advocate General’s opinion in the NV Reibel / JSC VO Stankoimport proceedings had reopened the debate to some degree. 

Livschitz turned to Switzerland, where things are, in his words, “never quite as straightforward as they appear”. A threshold difficulty he flagged was determining whether sanctions even apply in a given case – something that is not always obvious even where the claimant is not itself a designated party but forms part of a structure said to be under Russian control. Beyond that, Swiss lower courts have been divided on whether to treat the effect of sanctions as unlawfulness or as objective impossibility, and the distinction is far from academic: under Swiss law, objective impossibility permanently extinguishes an obligation. Livschitz found this conceptually hard to square with how sanctions actually work – they are, by design, a temporary pressure tool – and his firm is currently testing that argument before the Swiss courts.  

The Russian Perspective  

Taraskin focused on two developments that any practitioner working on Russia-related disputes will recognize. The first was the Lugovoy Law mechanism – Articles 248.1 and 248.2 of the Russian Arbitration Procedure Code – which allows a Russian party to take a dispute to a Russian commercial court on the basis that its arbitration agreement has been rendered unenforceable by sanctions. In principle, the burden of showing unenforceability sits with the applicant. In practice, the Supreme Court’s decision in Uraltransmash v. PESA shifted things considerably, effectively introducing a presumption that sanctions imposed by a foreign state cast doubt on the impartiality of forums in that state – a presumption that lower courts subsequently applied. The Constitutional Court’s decision in OWH v. VTB Bank brought some balance: the provisions must not be applied automatically, and the courts are required to assess whether the circumstances would genuinely impede access to justice in the chosen forum. Taraskin welcomed this as a step in the right direction, though he was candid that it had not stopped some courts from misapplying the mechanism – including, in one case currently handled by his firm, against a foreign subsidiary with no sanctions exposure whatsoever.  

Turning to Article 11 of EU Regulation 833/2014, Taraskin gave an overview of the NV Reibel / JSC VO Stankoimport proceedings, in which the Russian Arbitration Association filed an amicus curiae brief arguing that Article 11 was intended for judicial proceedings and should not prevent arbitral tribunals from hearing claims. The Advocate General's opinion adopted an intermediate position: while it does not prohibit the initiation of arbitral proceedings, Article 11 may bar tribunals from granting relief, and non-compliant awards risk being set aside on public policy grounds. Taraskin's objection to this was pointed – the opinion, in his view, sidesteps the fundamental question of whether repayment of an advance payment is really the same thing as performing a prohibited contract, which, in his view, is not. 

Efficiency, Enforceability and the Choice of Seat 

Vajani brought a wider lens to the discussion, and his framing was perhaps the sharpest of the session. Neutrality, he argued, is no longer something you can establish by pointing to a seat on a map. It has become multidimensional: legal, in terms of institutional quality and the robustness of the arbitration law; financial, in terms of whether payment and enforcement channels actually function under current sanctions conditions; and perceptual, in terms of whether parties from different geopolitical camps regard the seat as genuinely independent. The same logic applies to efficiency – a process that produces an award that cannot be enforced, or that stalls under the weight of sanctions-related complications, is not efficient in any meaningful sense. What efficiency requires today, he said, is enforceability combined with resilience. 

What struck Vajani was the extent to which the checklist for choosing a seat has changed. Parties are no longer simply comparing institutional rules or cost structures. They are also considering whether a seat will be acceptable to their counterparty, whether its courts will hold up under pressure, and whether enforcement routes remain open given the current sanctions landscape. On funding, he made a point that generated real discussion: funders are now asking not only whether the claim is strong, but whether any recovery can ultimately be realised, or, in other words, whether the capital can actually be brought home. That shift is quietly but significantly reshaping how disputes are structured and where they are brought. 

Conclusion  

Walking out of the session, the overriding impression was that the international arbitration community is still in the middle of working out what these changes mean in practice. The framework is intact – the reasonable doubt test, the no-claims provisions, the selection of a seat – but they are being pulled in directions their architects did not anticipate. If there was one idea that tied the afternoon together, it was the distinction between formal neutrality and functional neutrality: not whether a system was designed to be neutral, but whether it still operates that way when the pressure is on. That is a more difficult question than it used to be, and the honest answer – as this panel showed – is that it depends very much on where one stands.  

This post is part of Kluwer Arbitration Blog’s coverage of Paris Arbitration Week 2026.