2022-12-05T15:18:04+08:002022-12-05|News|

The University of Macau (UM) and the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Regional Centre for Asia and the Pacific (UNCITRAL-RCAP) today (2 December) held a conference titled ‘The Renewed Role of Legal Harmonisation in the Post-Pandemic Recovery of International Trade and Commerce’ to discuss the challenges facing international trade in the post-pandemic era and assess the relevance of legal harmonisation.

This is the tenth joint event co-organised by UM and UNCITRAL RCAP. Since 2014, the two institutions have successfully held eight high-level international conferences and one international legal symposium. This year’s conference focused on investment arbitration, cross-border insolvency, and regulation of electronic transactions. The event also featured a talk titled ‘Negotiable Multimodal Transport Documents’, one of the emerging issues on UNCITRAL’s agenda.

During the event, experts and scholars from different countries and regions, including South Korea, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macao, gave speeches on legal harmonisation issues related to international trade and commerce. They covered various contemporary issues in the harmonisation of laws, including insolvency, the digitalisation of commercial contracts, the promotion of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, and other legal developments in international trade and commerce in the global market, including the Greater Bay Area. The Q&A sessions focused on challenges facing international trade in the post-pandemic era.

Guests attending the opening ceremony included Athita Komindr, head of the UNCITRAL-RCAP; Fan Mingchao, executive vice president of Shanghai Arbitration Commission (China); Brad Wang, deputy secretary general of CIETAC Hong Kong Arbitration Center; Rosita Vong Sok Hei, secretary general of the World Trade Center Macau Arbitration Center; Petrel Ng Hoi In, secretary general of the Arbitration Center of the Macau Lawyers Association; Tong Io Cheng, dean of the Faculty of Law (FLL) of UM; Rostam J Neuwirth, head of the Department of Global Legal Studies in the FLL; and Muruga Perumal Ramaswamy, associate professor in the FLL. The conference was supported by the World Trade Center Macau Arbitration Center, the Shanghai Arbitration Commission, and CIETAC Hong Kong Arbitration Center.