A tribute to Professor Albert Jan van den Berg by Erica Stein

Good afternoon, everyone. I am Erica Stein, an independent
arbitrator based in Brussels, and I have the pleasure of taking you
through this last panel of the day.

The title of this panel would indicate that the next 20 minutes will be
dedicated to the Launch of the 2nd Edition of ICCA’s Guide to the
Interpretation of the 1958 New York Convention. While that is partly
true, this is also a moment to follow up from the wonderful panel we
just listened to.
We just heard many ways in which the NY Convention is a human
endeavor. We heard from judges who apply it. From practitioners
who use it, and whose clients rely on it. This morning, we also
heard from one of the visionaries and influencers of the New York
Convention, Piet Sanders. Without much further ado, I am honored
to now turn the floor over to another visionary and influencer of the
NYC, Albert Jan van den Berg, to launch the Second Edition of the
Judges’ Guide.

Albert Jan
The launch of the Judges’ Guide has just happened. So you may
all be asking yourselves: why is Stein back up on the podium? I
can tell you why. Because I have the immense pleasure of now
honoring you, Albert Jan, as a visionary and influencer in the human
endeavor that is the NY Convention, just as you had previously
done for Piet in producing the video we saw earlier today.
For those of you who do not know me, I should start by saying that I
worked for Albert Jan for six years at the beginning of my career.
He showed me what it means to be a diligent, careful, thoughtful,
and insightful arbitrator. He showed me what it means to
understand the honor and privilege of being entrusted by parties to
decide their disputes. He made me love the profession. In many
ways, he made me want to follow in his footsteps. In short, he is my
mentor.
But let’s go back in time in this human endeavor to when Albert Jan
started working for his mentor, Piet Sanders. After studying law in
the Netherlands and France, Albert Jan went to New York. Halfway
through his studies at NYU, Piet asked Albert Jan to assist him with
editing the ICCA Yearbook on Commercial Arbitration, of which Piet
had become the General Editor. Piet proposed that Albert Jan
combine editing with writing his thesis. Albert Jan liked the idea, but
liked the idea of hitchhiking from New York to Peru more. So he did
that first – before returning to the Netherlands in July 1975 to start
working in Piet’s attic, analyzing awards and cases. (Although Piet
reportedly encouraged Albert Jan to pursue his foreign travels, I
cannot help but think that Piet put Albert Jan in the attic as some
sort of payback…)
Regardless, the work in Piet’s attic planted two important seeds:
- The first was the publication, in 1981, of Albert Jan’s thesis,
which has become the seminal treatise on the New York
Convention. Keep in mind – because I will come back to this
later – that the objective of that thesis was to achieve the uniform
interpretation and application of the Convention across
jurisdictions;
- And the second seed was his nearly 50-year relationship with
ICCA, first as Piet’s assistant, and then as General Editor of
ICCA Publications for 32 years, not to mention as the founder
and chair of its judiciary committee, as a member of ICCA’s
governing board and its President between 2014 and 2016.
These two seeds of his thesis and work at ICC grew together over
time to affirm Albert Jan’s influence on how we look at the New York
Convention.
Albert Jan’s influence grew through practicality. While working in
Piet’s attic, Albert Jan developed an indexing system to catalog
cases according to topics that concern the interpretation and
application of the Convention. That indexing system is still applied
throughout all ICCA materials related to the Convention today. This
has made accessing relevant information to the Convention
possible and efficient.
Albert Jan’s influence on how we look at the New York Convention
grew through curiosity. Ever since his thesis, Albert Jan has always
been on the lookout for interesting decisions on the Convention,
from across the world, particularly when courts are confronted with
the important issues of the Convention for the first time. Because
he is a sleuth, he has kept our knowledge about the application of
the Convention up-to-date and global. In so doing, he has inspired
others to participate in this effort. For instance, he inspired the
conception of the ICCA Tsinghua working group that worked on the
Compendium on Chinese Arbitration Laws, and then the collection
of Chinese arbitration cases.
Albert Jan’s influence on how we look at the New York Convention
grew through sharing. Albert Jan has not only sought out
interesting decisions - he has always reviewed them, catalogued
them, and readily shared his views as to why and where the courts
got it right, or wrong. Albert Jan has never stopped trying to make
information on the Convention available to as wide an audience as
possible – not only through his work at ICCA, but also personally.
We have just heard from Albert Jan about the revamp of his
website.
Albert Jan’s influence on how we look at the New York Convention
grew through teaching. As we have just heard, ICCA decided to
publish the Judges Guide. Following up from this, Albert Jan and
others at ICCA came up with the idea to “put the show on the road”
to bring the Guide directly to the Judges. These ICCA Roadshows
have been a great success, reaching 79 countries and 2074 judges
around the world. Albert Jan has, alongside colleagues, trained over
400 judges himself, in Ghana, Mexico, Indonesia, Rwanda,
Malaysia, Mauritius, Brazil. And closer to home, in 2015, he carried
out a Roadshow here in Hong Kong and, later that same year,
visited the Supreme People’s Court to discuss the application of the
New York Convention there, as well.
Albert Jan has not only taught judges. He has taught hundreds of
students about the New York Convention – from Miami to Geneva,
from Washington to Singapore, from Rotterdam to Beijing. His
impact cannot be understated. To give some local color, Albert Jan
started teaching at Tsinghua University from the moment the
International Arbitration and Dispute Settlement course was set up
in 2012.
I have just confirmed the ways in which Albert Jan has influenced
how we look at the New York Convention. But let me mention why
he is a visionary, as well:
First, as I mentioned at the outset, Albert Jan’s objective with his
1981 thesis was to achieve the uniform interpretation and
application of the Convention across jurisdictions. Looking at
Convention decisions today, we see that his lifetime of work has led
to this result. Innumerable courts regularly refer to his thesis to
determine how to decide key issues. More recently, the Judge’s
Guide has started to play that role, as well, with citations to the
guide found in cases reported from Australia to the UK, from the
Benelux to Brazil, with Cyprus, Ecuador, Georgia, India, Israel,
Portugal, Singapore, and Switzerland in between. Albert Jan’s goal
of uniformity has, largely, been achieved. And it is only right that
the 2nd edition of the Judges’ Guide (2024) has been dedicated to
him:

“Echoing the words of Professor Pieter Sanders, author of
the Foreword to the First Edition as Honorary General Editor
of the Guide, who passed away in 2012 shortly after its
publication, we expect that this Second Edition of the Guide
will serve as a tool in advancing the mantra he repeated on
many occasions: ‘May the New York Convention Live,
Flourish and Grow’.
“If there is one person that embodies this motto it is Prof.
Albert Jan van den Berg. As founder and chair of the
Judiciary Committee, a position that he held for ten years, as
general editor of ICCA’s Yearbook Commercial Arbitration for
thirty-two years, as creator of the essential database
www.newyorkconvention.org, as well as through his entire
career, his contributions to the study and development of the
New York Convention are unparalleled. For these reasons
and many more that would require long pages to be listed,
this Second Edition of the Guide is dedicated to him.”

Second, Albert Jan is a visionary because, despite the Convention’s
success, he is willing to recognize its flaws and demand something
better. In his keynote atthe ICCA Congress in Dublin in 2008,
celebrating the Convention’s 50th anniversary, Albert Jan
suggested that it was time to modernize the Convention and
proposed a new Draft Convention. In his words, the new Draft
Convention was to improve upon the current New York Convention
by “being readily understandable by practitioners and judges in
many countries”, by “keeping the text to a bare minimum” and
“offering clear and simple solutions based on current practice”.
Albert Jan continues to push himself, and us, forward intellectually,
and it may be that one day, his vision of a modernized Convention
may well become a reality.
With this, Albert Jan, I wish to say thank you, on behalf of the IA
community, for having played your part as an influencer and
visionary in the human endeavor that is the New York Convention.
And I also wish to thank ICCA and the organizers for having given
me the opportunity to come up here and say these few words in
your honor.