TFL Vsebine / Revija Slovenska arbitražna praksa

Arbitration has taken a long time in finding its place under the sun of Serbian dispute resolution tradition, over which the courts still hold supremacy. Serbia is a small country which was, until recently, under a strict socialist regime which largely affected free trade and therefore the number of potential foreign trade or any kind of international disputes. In that sense, one can say that Serbia took a long time in acknowledging arbitration as a relevant mechanism of dispute resolution and an arbitration law dealing with arbitration with an overall capacity was adopted only recently. The first law governing arbitration proceedings comprehensively, the Serbian Law on Arbitration, was rendered only in 2006 and it is, as in many other countries, based on the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration. One could have a long debate on why precisely the UNCITRAL Model Law was used as a template, but in the end, maybe we should all just go along with a notion of one professor of the University of Belgrade who famously stated that the Model law was written in order to “teach us all how to do it”.