Hamid Sharif (Pakistan)

First Managing Director of the Complaints-Resolution and Evaluation Unit, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)

Former Country Director for the People’s Republic of China at the Asian Development Bank (ADB)

Opening

Every year, cross-border commerce generates disputes worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Most of the contracts behind those disputes route these disputes to international arbitration rather than national courts. That shift did not happen by accident. It happened because of one instrument: the 1958 New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards. I want to spend the next few minutes on how that Convention built the architecture we now take for granted, how it is evolving, and why—speaking as someone from Pakistan, addressing an audience in China —our two jurisdictions offer a particularly instructive lens on where this system is heading.

The Convention as foundation

The New York Convention now binds more than 170 states and regions. Its genius is structural: Article III requires courts to recognize foreign awards with minimal formality, and Article V gives them an exhaustive, narrow list of grounds to refuse enforcement. That combination is what makes an arbitral award, in practice, more enforceable across borders than a foreign court judgment. No other instrument in transnational commercial law has achieved that kind of near-universal reach.

Procedural modernization 

The Convention's framework is fixed, but the practice built on top of it keeps moving. Leading arbitral institutions — the ICC, SIAC, LCIA, HKIAC — have rewritten their rules for speed: emergency arbitrator provisions, expedited procedures, and consolidation and joinder mechanisms. Virtual hearings are now common, and we are seeing increasing use of AI that is moving from document review into more contested territory — assisting, even if not yet replacing, aspects of evidentiary assessment. All this reform is really a response to one pressing need: arbitration's original promise was that it would be faster and cheaper than litigation, and in many cases that promise has eroded. The institutions are now racing to restore it.

Enforcement jurisprudence — Pakistan and China 

Where the Convention's real character shows itself is in how domestic courts apply it. And here I want to draw on Pakistan, because the trajectory is instructive and because it rhymes with China's own experience.

Pakistan's Supreme Court has explicitly endorsed the pro-enforcement bias built into the Convention. Writing for the Court just last year, Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah held that foreign arbitral awards are “not to be treated as ordinary civil decrees; rather, they possess a binding character under international law, to which Pakistan has expressly committed itself.” The same judge went further; holding that domestic courts are “no longer seen as competitors to arbitration but as essential partners in ensuring the effectiveness and integrity of the process,” and that “their duty is to support, not to supplant, the arbitral process.” That is not an isolated sentiment from the Supreme Court alone. Justice Jawad Hassan of the Lahore High Court, enforcing an LCIA award, held that Pakistan's pro-enforcement practice “casts a duty on the Courts to build the confidence of investors by protecting the sanctity of arbitration agreements.” Together, these rulings reflect a settled judicial consensus, reinforced by Pakistan's 2011 domestic implementing legislation and, more recently, a draft Arbitration Bill moving toward the UNCITRAL Model Law.

China has walked a parallel path.China's Supreme People's Court has implemented a system requiring lower courts to report any intended refusal of a foreign arbitral award up through a chain of review to the Supreme People's Court for approval, ensuring consistent adjudicative standards. Mainland courts moved from an early, caution-heavy posture toward a far more consistent pro-enforcement stance. Indeed, the Suzhou Intermediate People’s Court in Russkaya Kozha v. Jiangsu Huada Centrifuge Manufacturing Co., Ltd. demonstrated this pro-enforcement bias by giving a narrow reading of public policy. In this way Pakistan and China as two large jurisdictions with different legal traditions demonstrate convergence on the same doctrine because the doctrine works and is crucial for cross border trade and investment.

I would like to flag one recent Pakistani decision, precisely because it complicates a simple narrative: the Lahore High Court, in SpaceCom v. Wateen, declined enforcement over a misdesignated seat of arbitration under Article V(1)(d), and some read it as a retreat from the pro-enforcement bias. I'd argue the opposite — a pro-enforcement regime that never says no isn't applying Article V, it's ignoring it. The credibility of the system depends on courts policing its narrow edges, not on courts rubber-stamping everything that arrives.

Given the CPEC relationship, contracts between Chinese and Pakistani entities are now subject to international arbitration and they very much rely on the legal infrastructure on the New York Convention and the convergence around a pro-enforcement bias.

The causation question 

The question arises: has the Convention caused the growth in arbitration's use, or did the two simply grow together with global trade? Frankly, isolating the Convention's causal contribution from decades of parallel globalization is difficult, and I won't pretend otherwise. But when you ask commercial parties directly why they choose arbitration over litigation, survey after survey (most notably the recurring Queen Mary/White & Case International Arbitration Surveys) finds one answer at the top, consistently, above neutrality, above confidentiality, above flexibility: enforceability of the award. That is about as close to a controlled experiment as this field offers us. Parties are not being asked to theorize about causation — they are telling us directly which feature of the system they value above others.

Closing 

The New York Convention did not just create a mechanism. It created a global expectation, namely, that a commercial promise, once arbitrated, will be honored across borders regardless of where the losing party's assets happen to sit. Pakistan and China, in their own ways, are both proof of that expectation taking root. The next frontier — ESG disputes, AI-assisted proceedings, further digitalization — will test the Convention in new ways. But sixty-eight years on, the core architecture is still doing exactly what it was built to do.

Thank you.