215 join Chartered Arbitrators

The ceremony, which held in Lagos on Friday, also featured the conferment of awards in various categories. Guests at the event included the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Walter Onnoghen, Supreme Court Justices Bode Rhodes-Vivour and Clara Ogunbiyi, as well as Court of Appeal Justices. Others were Federal and State High Court judges, Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs), President of the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE), Otis Anyaeji and 39 other engineers; accountants, quantity surveyors, among others. Justice Onnoghen, who was represented by Justice Rhodes-Vivour, spoke on the theme ‘Ethics and professionalism in arbitration’. He noted that with the expansion in global trade and investments, and the associated growth of commercial arbitration, there is a growing interest in establishing national laws governing arbitration ethics. “It may therefore be a good idea to expressly extend the ethics provisions of the Rules of proffesional conduct for legal practitioners 2007 and even the Legal Practitioners Act 2007 to lawyers acting as third party neutrals in Nigeria,” Onnoghen added. NICARB President/Chairman of Council, Aare Afe Babalola (SAN), who was represented by the institute’s Vice President, Prof Fabian Ajogwu (SAN), lamented the ‘export’ of a “significant number of home-generated disputes.” “The quest to domesticate arbitration in Nigeria continues to drive the activities of this institute. It is our belief that the time has come for a reversal of this trend,” Babalola said. Justices Bode Rhodes-Vivour and Clara Ogunbiyi were conferred with the honourary Fellows of the Institute (FCArb) title. Ajogwu, who praised the “very impressive turnout” of all professions, said: “Almost 25 percent of the persons inducted this evening are engineers, showing that in our institute arbitration is not the exclusive reserve of lawyers.” Echoing Justice Onnoghen, Ajogwu urged arbitrators to uphold fairness. He said: “Once you sit in a quasi-adjudicatory manner, you have to observe the principle of fair hearing to hear both sides, to not be biased, to recuse yourself if you have a vested interest in the matter and there comes in ethics, doing things well. “The summation is that if we do things well, we will create a better enabling environment for businesses because businesses want to rely on disputes being resolved if and when they occur and do so efficiently.” NICARB Registrar/Chief Executive Officer, Shola Oshodi-John, explained the high turnout of non-legal practioners. She said: “We had over 40 engineers being inducted as arbitrators. Arbitration began like a gentleman agreement and the pioneers of arbitration were not lawyers, they were businessmen who felt they could resolve their disputes in a better way than dragging themselves to court and exposing their trade secrets to the world. “So, what you saw is nothing new. It’s common all over the world. In Europe, The United States and Asia, a lot of the arbitrators are not lawyers. Arbitration is a specialised field. “For instance you cannot get a lawyer to arbitrate on a dispute that has a lot to do with quantity surveying. If you want to talk about the value of a property, the number of blocks, iron rods, bags of cement, etc used in constructing it, you would need a quantity surveyor to give you those details, not a lawyer.”]]>