International Arbitration has become a global practice where different legal systems are considered during the proceedings with lawyers, arbitrators, experts and parties from different school of thoughts and with different understanding of applicable ethical rules. Two legal systems, common law and civil law, are usually the most prevalent systems used in international arbitration.

The differences in the common law and civil law may cause a lack of uniformity in how the rules of ethical conduct are applied during a particular proceeding. Such differences drive ethics in international arbitration to become fragmented at all levels whether the issues deal with the unethical conduct of lawyers or the biased conduct on the part of the arbitrators and adjudicators. The issues regarding lawyers’ ethical conduct are usually dealt with in each lawyer’s respective jurisdiction where he or she practices. While all arbitrators are not necessarily lawyers, the issue concerning the regulation of an arbitrator’s ethical conduct becomes an issue of whether the arbitrator’s conduct should be regulated at all and if so, by whom? One may quickly answer that arbitration institutions can issue standard codes of conduct to regulate the arbitrators, but what about the ad hoc arbitrator? Who then should regulate such conduct? There are many questions that this brief paper will not be able to answer. This paper will expose some of the rules as they are in today’s international arbitration. The new code of best practices (CBP) published by the Spanish Arbitration Club is worth examining and as is the recent initiative of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) teaming up on the issue of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) Reforms by releasing the Draft of Code of Conduct for Adjudicators in Investor-State Dispute Settlement.