Correction and Interpretation of Award; Additional Award

Article 33 sets out the conditions warranting a correction or interpretation of the award, or the making of an additional award. In the beginning of the drafting process, there was no certainty if there was any need for the Model Law to deal with the various types of awards. However, later the negotiators were convinced that the Model Law should deal with this issue and the Commission affirmed this position by stating that in ‘preparing the model law due account be taken of the 1958 New York Convention and of the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules’. As to the particular point concerning the various types of awards, it was desired that if various types of awards were to be encompassed under the Model Law, the arbitrator should be entitled to make those awards only on the request of the parties. A fixed standard time period, as followed in national laws, was considered good practice, despite the difficulty of regulating such time limits uniformly. However, it was stipulated that if the standard time is laid down, it should be coupled with mechanisms for possible extensions.