A party to an  arbitral proceedings under VIAC’s rules  must send its notice and other submission to VIAC which will then forward the notice and submission to the other parties to the proceeding. This is different from SIAC’s rules which allow each party to send notice and submission directly to each other with a copy to SIAC. This arrangement is not effective and could give rise to potential challenges if VIAC does not handle the sending of notices and documents correctly.

Rule 3.2 provides that VIAC will send notices and documents to the parties at the addresses provided by the parties. If a party provides VIAC with more than one address (e.g., office addresses and email addresses, or addresses of the respondent and their counsels), then it is not clear if VIAC should send notice and documents to all the addresses provided to it or VIAC only needs to send notice and documents to only one of the addresses provided to it. The wording of Rule 3.2 seems to suggest that VIAC should send notices and documents to all addresses provided to it by the parties.

However, Rule 3.1 only requires the party to submit a number of copies which are sufficient for VIAC to forward one copy to each member of the Arbitral Tribunal and one copy to the other party. Accordingly, VIAC could take the view that since it only has one copy to forward, it could send the notice and document to one address out of several addresses provided to it by the parties. In practice, it appears that VIAC adopts this approach. Such an approach seems to be unreasonable since:

·       If the parties provide VIAC with more than one address, the parties usually expect to receive notices and documents to all of the addresses provided to VIAC. For example, if the dispute includes parties located in Vietnam and in foreign countries then the relevant party would expect VIAC to send the notices and documents to the address in Vietnam in addition to the address in foreign countries so that it can receive documents and notices in a timely manner; and

·       Rule 3.1 seems to apply to sending notices by courier or in person. On the other hand, Rule 3.2 allows notices to be sent via email. So if a party only provides email address for notice then it is not clear whether VIAC could arrange for the documents to be scanned and emailed to such party.

This post is written by Nguyen Quang Vu.