As Third-Party Funding (TPF) continues to shape the landscape of international arbitration, concerns over transparency, arbitrator independence, and ethical governance of disclosures have intensified. The 2024 ICSID-UNCITRAL Code of Conduct and the revised International Bar Association (IBA) Guidelines on Conflicts of Interest reflect a growing consensus for the need to regulate the ethical dimensions of arbitration. This paper explores how these frameworks, along with the forthcoming 2025 SIAC Rules, address the ethical challenges posed by TPF, particularly considering increasing scrutiny over conflicts of interest, arbitrator impartiality, and disclosure obligations. Through a comparative analysis of institutional regulations and recent case law, this paper examines whether existing ethical safeguards are sufficient to mitigate funder influence and uphold the legitimacy of arbitral proceedings. It also engages with broader ethical debates, such as the risks of repeat-player dynamics, arbitrator liability, and the impact of non-disclosure on award enforceability. By proposing a harmonized regulatory model, this paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on the future of ethics in arbitration, ensuring that transparency reforms balance access to justice with procedural fairness. As arbitration moves towards more nuanced and regulated institutionalization, TPF arrangements have been subsumed into the formal ethical architecture of arbitral bodies – entailing mandatory disclosure duties, binding conflict-of-interest checks and centralized cost-allocation mechanisms. Therefore, this study highlights the need for proactive regulatory measures to sustain public trust in the integrity of dispute resolution.
The essence of the BRICS+ group features a shared strategic aim: to foster economic cooperation in a manner that creates and facilitates financial and economic mechanisms that enable members to bypass – without necessarily excluding – the traditional OECD leaders. With trade and investment flows to and within the BRICS+ group already experiencing an upward trajectory, it is anticipated that geopolitical tensions and ongoing tariff turbulence will boost this growth in the medium and long run. Hence, the number of cross-border transactions involving parties from BRICS+ countries will continue to rise. Consequently, the need for effective dispute resolution mechanisms will grow. International commercial arbitration, and potentially mediation, are particularly well suited to resolving such disputes. Most business transactions and commercial arbitrations related to the BRICS+ group – or more broadly, to East Asia, Latin America and Africa – will involve at least one party from a civil law jurisdiction. We term this emerging market segment as BRICS+ arbitrations.
Parties may object to an arbitrator on the basis of a potential conflict of interest, where they have knowledge of the potential conflict and where they raise the objection in a timely manner. While it is widely accepted that ‘knowledge’ in this context encompasses constructive knowledge, there remains some debate as to how ‘constructive knowledge’ should be defined and applied. This paper examines these issues within the broader discussion on the scope of parties’‘duty of curiosity’, that is the extent to which parties are required to actively investigate an arbitrator’s independence and impartiality beyond what an arbitrator discloses. In particular, the paper analyses these questions through the lens of the introduction of the ‘duty of curiosity’ in the IBA Guidelines on Conflicts of Interest in International Arbitration 2024. The paper begins with the limits of the duty of disclosure on arbitrators, which in turn warrants the imposition of the duty of curiosity on parties and then proceeds to trace the development and application of the parties’ diligence obligations, finding that the duty of curiosity extends to such information that is readily accessible (notorious, even). The paper proceeds to attempt to reconcile points of tension between the competing but complementary duties of disclosure and curiosity, concluding that: (1) the arbitrator’s duty of disclosure is paramount, (2) the duty of curiosity provides consequences for parties’ bad faith actions which aim at gaming any gaps in disclosure; and (3) the standard for duty of curiosity must be aligned with the high threshold for waiver. The paper concludes with a practical guide on discharging the duty of curiosity.
This essay introduces a symposium on ethics in international arbitration within the Singapore arbitration ecosystem, situating the contributions within a broader account of arbitral ethics as system design. Singapore and Singapore International Arbitration Centre have long been associated with procedural innovation, but their more important contribution may be their sustained attention to the ethical infrastructure that supports arbitral legitimacy. Drawing on six contributions addressing arbitrator selection, disclosure and waiver, duties of curiosity, third-party funding, illegally obtained evidence, and the ICSID-UNCITRAL Code of Conduct, the essay identifies three cross-cutting themes. First, information functions as a regulatory resource. Without reliable information, party autonomy, market discipline, conflict checks, and procedural fairness are impaired. Second, selfregulation in arbitration operates through an architecture of accountability that links institutional rules, soft law, challenge procedures, and court review. Third, legitimacy is a dynamic output of institutional design, dependent on transparency, disclosure, enforcement, and adaptation to new ethical risks. The essay argues that ethical rules should be evaluated functionally, by asking whether they correct identifiable system failures without producing distortions such as exclusion, strategic behavior, or over-deterrence. It concludes that securing legitimacy in international arbitration requires more than aspirational principles. Legitimacy requires explicit, operational governance at every stage of the arbitral process, supported by institutional leadership, empirical evaluation, and continued attention to the relationship between consent, integrity, and inclusion.
