Lessons learned from around the world
The CMS Arbitration Atlas series has taken you on a data-driven journey exploring national courts’ attitudes towards arbitration in Hong Kong, Singapore, the UAE, Germany, the Netherlands, England & Wales, France, Chile, and South Africa.
As our travels around the world come to an end for now, we reflect on the patterns that have emerged and the practical lessons for arbitration practitioners navigating this complex global landscape.
Our own statistics reveals low challenge success rates globally
One of the key advantages of arbitration is the fact that is offers finality: compared to litigation, the grounds for challenging an arbitral award are narrower, meaning that once an arbitration is completed, parties can have more confidence that there is little prospect of the dispute being prolonged through challenges in the courts.
Importantly, the finality-advantage is borne out by the data we have analysed, which show consistently across jurisdictions that national courts overwhelmingly support arbitration and intervene rarely and only in exceptional circumstances.
We examined statistics relating to the number of challenges to arbitral awards brought in England & Wales, Hong Kong, France, Germany, and Chile (either by looking at publicly available data, or by deriving our own statistics from published cases). Across each jurisdiction, success rates for applications to challenge arbitral awards are remarkably low, reinforcing the finality that arbitration promises and delivers in practice.
One of the key advantages of arbitration is the fact that is offers finality: compared to litigation, the grounds for challenging an arbitral award are narrower, meaning that once an arbitration is completed, parties can have more confidence that there is little prospect of the dispute being prolonged through challenges in the courts.
Importantly, the finality-advantage is borne out by the data we have analysed, which show consistently across jurisdictions that national courts overwhelmingly support arbitration and intervene rarely and only in exceptional circumstances.
We examined statistics relating to the number of challenges to arbitral awards brought in England & Wales, Hong Kong, France, Germany, and Chile (either by looking at publicly available data, or by deriving our own statistics from published cases). Across each jurisdiction, success rates for applications to challenge arbitral awards are remarkably low, reinforcing the finality that arbitration promises and delivers in practice.
- In England & Wales, we found that, between 2018 – 2024, the average success rate across all challenge routes was just 4%. Even the most successful category for appeals, appeals on points of law under section 69 of the Arbitration Act, had an average success rate of just 5%. Obtaining permission to appeal under section 69 remains difficult, and is no guarantee of success.
- In Hong Kong, HKIAC statistics show just eight awards being set aside over a four year period and an average success rate of just 16%.
- In France, CMS data reveals that only 14% of set-aside applications between 2022 and 2025 succeed before the Paris Court of Appeal.
- In Germany, there is a similar trend, resulting in setting aside an arbitral award.
- In the Netherlands, CMS data identifies just four successful set-aside applications (in full or part) between 2021 – 2025, a success rate of just 11.8%.
- Finally, in Chile, while the recurso de queja represents over 50% of all challenges, more than 95% of these challenges are dismissed or declared inadmissible.
In addition, we found that courts appear to assess each application on its merits without regard to external factors, with there being no correlation between the number of successful challenges and the number of challenge applications brought.
Availability of data differs between jurisdictions
Surprisingly there is something of a dearth of statistics relating to arbitral challenges in many jurisdictions:
Limited Statistics
In most countries covered, no statistics relating to the number of challenges applications and their results were readily available.
Publication Bias in Arbitration Challenges
In a few jurisdictions, such as Germany and France, it is possible to derive data from reviewing published court decisions but that requires all relevant decisions to be published, which is not necessarily the case. For example, in Germany the statistics that we generated were skewed by the fact that the courts have a greater tendency to publish decisions in which arbitral challenges were successful, which can create a misleading impression.
A Comparative Outlier
The clear outlier in this regard is England & Wales, with the Commercial Court publishing granular statistics that allowing detailed analyses of caseloads and success rates that were not possible elsewhere.At present, there is no indication that the current situation will change. This is unfortunate, as both the arbitration community and commercial parties would benefit from being able to identify trends in how courts deal with arbitration and, more importantly, evaluate how supportive each jurisdiction is toward arbitration.
Pro-arbitration judicial attitudes: a global trend
Despite the diversity of legal systems examined, the courts examined share an aligned approach:
| 1. Support, not substitution: Encouragingly, our global tour has demonstrated the unmistakable pro-arbitration stance adopted by courts in virtually every jurisdiction examined. National courts recognise their dual role of support and supervision, while taking seriously their responsibility not to interfere with the arbitral process. |
| 2. Narrow grounds of challenge: Jurisdictions worldwide offer only limited grounds for challenging awards, and courts will intervene only where narrowly defined criteria are satisfied. For example, German courts will only intervene where there is a violation of public policy or the right to be heard; in the Netherlands, awards may only be challenged under five specific, limited formal grounds; and in England, awards may only be challenged under three defined grounds. |
| 3. A high bar for interference: Singapore courts intervene only in the most exceptional cases involving clear procedural irregularity that has caused real or actual prejudice. Similarly, in Hong Kong, applicants relying on procedural grounds must act quickly and demonstrate a serious breach of due process. Even in Dubai, where the dual legal system creates divergent thresholds, the DIFC courts have adopted a narrow approach to the public policy defence, reflecting their pro-arbitration attitude. |
| 4. Finality above all: The principle that arbitral awards should be final and binding underpins national courts’ approaches worldwide. Perhaps the starkest example is South Africa, where national courts consistently refuse to entertain appeals of arbitral awards on the merits even where that is the parties’ agreed intention and potentially a constitutional right. |
The public policy exception remains narrow in practice
Each of the jurisdictions covered in the Arbitration Atlas series allow their national courts to decline to enforce an award where doing so would be contrary to ‘public policy’ in the country in question.
The potentially expansive nature of the public policy exception means that it is ripe for misuse, with there being scope for parties and national courts to use public policy grounds to challenge otherwise enforceable awards through the back door.
However, national courts consistently confine the application of public policy to exceptional cases involving fundamental legal principles, rather than ordinary errors of law or reasoning.
This restraint is evident in traditionally arbitration‑friendly seats such as France, Germany, Hong Kong and Singapore, where courts emphasise that public policy is not a vehicle for revisiting the merits of an award.
Even where public policy is articulated in broader terms- most notably within the UAE’s onshore court system- successful reliance on the exception remains uncommon, even when contrasted with the DIFC courts’ deliberately high threshold.
The takeaway is clear: public policy is not an invitation to rehear a case.
Practical lessons for parties, practitioners and tribunals
Throughout the series, three key practical messages have recurred across jurisdictions:
- Timing is key. Parties must raise procedural or jurisdictional objections promptly, and any delay may prove fatal to any subsequent attempts to challenge an award on the basis of jurisdiction or procedural irregularity.
- Parties must plead arguments explicitly and completely. Courts will not entertain arguments that were not raised during the arbitral proceedings.
- Tribunals must provide case-specific reasoning. Practitioners should remain vigilant to any inadequate or recycled reasoning from a tribunal, particularly where there may be related proceedings. In Singapore and Germany, awards may be set aside where tribunals materially misunderstand the parties’ cases or fail to engage with essential submissions.
Conclusion
As our CMS Arbitration Atlas series concludes for now, one message rings clear: international arbitration’s promise of finality is underpinned by a global consensus among national courts to support, rather than supplant, the arbitral process.
Challenging awards remains difficult everywhere, and courts continue to set high thresholds for intervention. For arbitration practitioners, a well-conducted arbitration, with clearly pleaded arguments and timely objections, will withstand judicial scrutiny.
We hope you have enjoyed travelling the world with us. If you would like to revisit any chapters, please visit the CMS Arbitration Atlas homepage.
For more information about arbitration in any of our featured jurisdictions, please refer to the relevant country chapter in the CMS Expert Guide to International Arbitration.
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