International Arbitration and National Criminal Proceedings: Presentation Given to the Luxembourg Arbitration Association, 30 June 2020

This paper examines how arbitral proceedings and domestic criminal processes can interact; how parties to arbitrations have attempted to use domestic criminal proceedings to advance their interests; and how arbitral tribunals can and should respond to such attempts. It concludes that arbitral tribunals must take account of concurrent national criminal proceedings but cannot defer entirely to them. This is not only because they undertake a different role but also because national authorities cannot always entirely be trusted. In turn, this means that tribunals can find themselves between Scylla and Charybdis, so that arbitrators must be skillful navigators to get safely to their destination: an enforceable award.