Guidelines on international contracts. UNICTRAL versus ICC.
May 29, 2009
United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) makes available a good body of knowledge on international trade and on dispute resolution on its web sites.
Particularly useful and informative is The Digest of Case Law on the United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods. However, the framework provided by the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) is not perfectly suitable for technology, equipment and plant supply contracts.
The framework provided by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) addresses the problematic of technology, equipment and plant supply better.
The web sites of ICC have a good feature that we particularly liked. ICC makes available contributions of law professionals for different events and seminars. A good example is the 10 pages Notes by Michelangelo Cicogna from Studio Legale De Berti Jacchia Franchini Forlani for the PIDA Seminar in Paris in February 2009.
A citation:
Many professionals who start drafting a contract have their first problems with the blank
page (the so called “blank page syndrome”3). If the following pages could provide at least
some help in overcoming this kind of problem, I would consider it a success.
Probably the perfect formula for drafting an international contract does not exist. However,
the guiding principle when starting to draft a contract should be to identify the essence of
the substantive elements of the commercial relationship, the basic and essential terms of the
contractual provisions (that is to say creating the skeleton of the contract) and, at a second
stage, complete the contract with the necessary accessory provisions. Always keeping in mind
that, not rarely, one of the best virtues of a good contract is its simplicity.