Public policy as a ground for refusal to recognize and enforce foreign arbitral awards and court decisions

In our contemporary world the line between “international”, “national” and “foreign” have been becoming more and more blurred. This made international arbitration and dispute resolution in foreign courts more accessible and more popular for regular legal entities. However, when two different legislations meet, it is possible that they would contradict each other. In order to protect most valued principles of national legislations the concept of public policy was introduced. This concept does not have its own crystalized definition which allows national legislations to freely interpret it. And this is the main advantage and disadvantage of it. From one point of view, it allows to define what principles are important for each country with the basis on their national features. However, at the same time this understanding allows for the very chaotic interpretation. The preset thesis is dedicated to the issue of interpretation of the public policy concept in Russian legislation. Russian legislation provides for the quite narrow understanding of the public policy concept. However, in practice such understanding can be turned upside down. Thus, the main aim of the present work is focused on resolving such issue. In order to resolve it the present thesis is focused on finding roots of the raised problem, analyzes historical, theoretical frameworks, encompasses the comparative analysis of application in different jurisdictions, raises questions of rationality of the Russian approach. The main hypothesis of the present work is that the mentioned problem can be cured in two ways. Firstly, it is needed to distinguish between the public policy and other grounds to deny enforcement. It is important to understand that the public policy is an “emergency break” for most exceptional situations. Secondly, it is needed to include regulations for different kinds of disputes, which would provide concrete tests that a court would need to apply in order to access all needed circumstances.