ERDEM-NEWSLETTER-2018-metin

142 NEWSLETTER 2018 Consequences of the Failure to comply with Document Production Orders in International Arbitrations* Prof. Dr. H. Ercument Erdem Document production requests and orders issued by the arbitral tribunal on the production of documents play an important role in in- ternational arbitrations. They are a tool to ensure that the requesting party gains access to documents, which are not in their possession, in order to provide sufficient proof to support their claims or defenses. Accordingly, failure to comply with document production orders, and the consequences of this failure, may have a bearing on the outcome of the case. In this article, the consequences of the failure to comply with document production orders will be analyzed. In General In international arbitrations, document production proceedings are mostly conducted under the IBA Rules on the Taking of Evidence in International Arbitration (“IBA Rules”) 1 . The IBA Rules may be adopted by the parties to be used, together with other procedural rules governing international arbitrations, whether they are institutional rules, or ad hoc rules. Due to its international character, the parties to an international arbitration come from different legal cultures; therefore, they are familiar with different procedures on the taking of evidence. For in- stance, parties with a common law background would be familiar with a thorough discovery proceeding; whereas, parties with a civil law background would have a totally different understanding. Against this backdrop, the use of the IBA Rules for the taking of evidence gains * Article of September 2018 1 The IBA Rules: https://www.ibanet.org/Document/Default.aspx?DocumentUid= 68336C49-4106-46BF-A1C6-A8F0880444DC (Access date: September 2018).