At the invitation of the president of the Bar of Guadeloupe, Charles Nicolas, the team leading the OHADAC project presented the OHADAC Centre for Arbitration and Mediation project to an audience made up of members of the Bar of Guadeloupe, St Martin and St Barthélémy together with business leaders on June 28.

This event followed on from the positive decision taken by the committee responsible for the Interreg V Caribbean programme to allocate funds to the project to establish an OHADAC Centre for Arbitration and Mediation for the Caribbean region. This Centre will be based in Pointe-à-Pitre.

The presentation began with a talk by Patrick Vial-Collet, president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Islands of Guadeloupe, which is leading the project. Vial-Collet underlined the need for companies in the Caribbean region to have access to effective, affordable dispute resolution methods that meet the needs of businesses in the area.

As has been pointed out, the role of members of the Bar is pivotal in this context. The need for accessible arbitration and mediation services must be supported by lawyers with suitable training and at reasonable rates. These are the conditions under which the Centre will have the expected positive impact on business relations in the Caribbean region.

Marie-Camille Pitton, a lawyer and former advisor to the International Chamber of Commerce, is responsible for developing the arbitration and mediation aspects of the OHADAC project. She presented the operations of the future Arbitration and Mediation Centre to the audience.

Future OHADAC arbitrators will also have a body of harmonised rules at their disposal: the first phase of the OHADAC project - which came to an end in 2015 - was used to draft legislation about private international law, international trade contracts, commercial companies and ad hoc arbitration. This synergy between the Centre for Arbitration and harmonised commercial law lies at the heart of the integrative project that is OHADAC, led by the president Catherine Sargenti, a magistrate, at the ACP Legal association since 2007.

The next events with the Order of the Bar of Guadeloupe are scheduled for the last week of October. The Bar of Guadeloupe, St Martin and St Barthélémy will host the Inter-Bar Games of the Caribbean Bars on October 25 and 26, 2019. A course on arbitration and an OHADAC conference will be organised in the days prior to the Games. Full details about these events will be posted on the OHADAC website.