Six Bolivian arbitration time limits foreign counsel should know

A party that loses an arbitration seated in Bolivia has ten business days, not three months, to apply for the annulment of the award. An application filed late is rejected without further proceedings under Article 113 of Law 708, Bolivia's Conciliation and Arbitration Law.

Under Article 54 of the same Law, every arbitration seated in Bolivia is a domestic arbitration, even when the parties are foreign. Counsel used to the UNCITRAL Model Law, whose Article 34 allows three months, will find that Law 708, Law 365 and the FIDIC conditions set other short time limits throughout the life of a dispute. Six of them, in the order in which they usually arise:

28 days to give notice of dissatisfaction with a Dispute Board decision under a FIDIC contract (Sub-Clause 20.4 of the 1999 and MDB editions, Sub-Clause 21.4 of the 2017 edition).

15 calendar days for the insurer to pay a performance bond issued in favour of a Bolivian public entity, counted from the entity's notice of default. Any dispute about the default does not delay payment (Law 365, Articles 3, 4 and 7).

The protest, which must be raised during the arbitral proceedings, and not after the award, if the ground is to be relied on in an annulment application (Law 708, Article 112.II).

10 business days to file the annulment application, before the same Arbitral Tribunal that rendered the award (Articles 53, 111 and 113).

3 business days to file a compulsa before the civil and commercial court on duty if the Arbitral Tribunal refuses to grant the annulment application (Article 116).

10 business days for the opposing party to respond to an application for recognition of a foreign award before the Supreme Court of Justice (Article 124).

None of them is won on the last day. All of them are prepared earlier: when the arbitration clause is negotiated, while the contract is performed and throughout the proceedings.

Ronald Brian Martin Alarcón · Originally published on LinkedIn