ESQ Legal Practice Magazine JUNE 2014 EDITION | Page 81

Membership of the New York Convention is
also good news for domestic parties with
counterparties with assets in foreign countries, as it gives African countries reciprocal
access to 148 countries across the globe for
the recognition and enforcement of domestic
arbitral awards.

African counterparty insists
upon an African seat of
arbitration. Whilst the
attitudes of national courts to
arbitration and the speed of
enforcement varies from
country to country, membership of the New York
Convention generally
provides such investors with
an effective and predictable
tool to seek recognition and
enforcement of arbitral awards
in these situations.
Membership of the New York
Convention is also good news
for domestic parties with
counterparties with assets in
foreign countries, as it gives
African countries reciprocal
access to 148 countries across
the globe for the recognition
and enforcement of domestic
arbitral awards.
81 I EsQ legal practice

L'ORGANISATION POUR
L'HARMONISATION DU
DROIT DES AFFAIRES EN
AFRIQUE (OHADA)
OHADA was created by
Treaty in 1993 and seeks to
provide a harmonised, secure
legal framework for the
conduct of business in Africa
by operating a uniform law
regime which upon adoption
becomes automatically
applicable in its member
states. Arbitration law is one
of the areas governed by
OHADA. The 17 OHADA
member states are Benin,
Burkina Faso, Cameroon,
Central African Republic,
Chad, the Comoros, Congo,
Côte d'Ivoire, Equatorial
Guinea, Gabon, Guinea
Bissau, Guinea, Mali, Niger,

Senegal and Togo. They are
predominately of the civil law
legal tradition and French
speaking.
OHADA has a comparatively
modern arbitral regime. The
recognition and enforcement
of awards within all member
states is governed by the
Uniform Act of Arbitration
1999, which sets out the basic
rules applicable to any
arbitration where the seat of
arbitration is located in an
OHADA member state and
supersedes the national
arbitration laws.
The Uniform Act recognises a
valid arbitral award as final
and binding on the parties and
provides a mechanism for the
enforcement of arbitral awards
subject only to one ground for
refusal of enforcement

(namely, that the award is
manifestly contrary to the
international public order of
the OHADA member states).
However, critically, the
application of the Uniform Act
as regards enforcement is
limited to awards made in and
sought to be enforced in
OHADA member states.
It is worth noting that 10 of
the 17 OHADA member states
are also parties to the New
York Convention, including
Cameroon, Gabon, Côte
d'Ivoire and Senegal.
Accordingly, in these countries, the requirements set out
under article 5 of the New
York Convention will apply
for the recognition and
enforcement of foreign, nonOHADA awards.
However, for the majority of

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