It is not a secret that not all the contracts, even thoroughly drafted by lawyers, end up with successful implementation of reached agreements. Sometimes both parties of the contract come to severe grievances on various issues related to conclusion and performance of the contract and have to refer to the competent bodies for resolving the conflict.

In this situation, the universal body that should hear the case is the court which has the jurisdiction over the dispute.

In this situation, the universal body that should hear the case is the court which has the jurisdiction over the dispute. However, it is often the case that when the subject of the dispute is the international contract, the conflict between the parties is resolved not by the state court but by the international commercial arbitration administered by an arbitration institute. The decisions of such arbitration are recognized and enforced under the New-York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards 1958.

Sometimes, the actions of the party to the contract violate the rights and legitimate interests of the other party which are not explicitly provided in the contract but protected under the public law of the particular state or interstate entity (e.g., the European Union). Such cases frequently arise in the field of finances, when banks or FinTech companies (so called “neo-banks”) illegally block bank accounts of clients and freeze money without any explanation. In this situation, the dispute with the financial organization can be resolved not only by a court, but also by a Financial ombudsman of the particular jurisdiction, for example, the Financial Ombudsman of Belgium (Ombudsfin), as well as similar bodies which have the power to hear the financial disputes of consumers.

During the last decades the noticeable growth has been recognized in the sphere of intellectual property.

Trademarks, utility patents, software are no longer nominal values in the balance sheet of the company – they are valuable assets the market price of which sometimes exceeds hundreds of millions of dollars. That is why the intellectual property rights, as well as the infringements of the IP rights become the subject of the dispute more and more often. Such disputes can be heard either by a court of the particular jurisdiction, or by a respective national IP office.

The special category of intellectual property disputes is domain name disputes.

The special category of intellectual property disputes is domain name disputes. In this case, the counter parties are trademark owner who is interested in the use of the domain name, and the administrator of the domain name which is similar to the trademark. If the conflict relates to the domain name of the highest level (.com, .net, .info etc.), the dispute between the trademark owner and the administrator can be heard by the Arbitration Center of the WIPO.