Continuation of Part II of the Arbitration Act 1950

Notes

This section maintains in force Part II of the Arbitration Act 1950, which sets out the enforcement regime applicable to the 1927 Geneva Convention.1 This provision has, in practice been all but superseded by enforcement under (and countries signing up to) the 1958 New York Convention (see sections 100–103). It remains in force only as regards those signatory countries that have not acceded to the New York Convention. But working out which countries remain party to the Geneva Convention is not easy, for two reasons: first, although there is (like the New York Convention) an online ‘status’ for the 1927 Convention on the UN website, it does not indicate which countries dropped out by reason of signing up to the New York Convention; second, and perhaps more importantly, the geopolitical world in 1927 – when the only intergovernmental body was known as the League of Nations and the British Empire covered almost a quarter of the earth’s land area – was a far different one to the one we know today. It is fair to say that half of the world’s nation states were not even in existence in 1927 and certainly not under the name they are now known by (for example, Northern Rhodesia was in 1927 a protectorate under British control, albeit added to the Geneva Convention in 1931, before becoming Zambia in 1964 and signing up to the New York Convention in 2002).