Eighty-nine percent of international arbitration stakeholders believe that ethnic diversity on the arbitral tribunal supports the perceived legitimacy of the system. Eighty percent believe it contributes to perceived fairness. And yet sixty-eight percent of those same stakeholders rate the tribunals they have recently encountered as lacking in ethnic diversity.
That gap – between what the arbitration community says it values and what it is actually experiencing – is the headline finding of a report produced by Cortex for the International Bar Association’s Arbitration Committee, published in May 2025 and recently recognised with Global Arbitration Review’s Pledge Award. The report was built on more than three years of work: a pilot interview study with senior in-house counsel from diverse backgrounds worldwide, followed by a large-scale survey of 305 arbitration stakeholders across 76 nationalities. The aim was to gather empirical data where previously there had been none – on how the arbitration community views ethnic diversity on tribunals and what impact it has on perceptions of legitimacy, fairness and the quality of arbitral decision-making.
The Pledge Award, given by Global Arbitration Review, recognises initiatives demonstrating outstanding effort to advance diversity of all forms in arbitration. The Pledge itself was launched in May 2016 by members of the arbitration community to increase the appointment of women as arbitrators, with the ultimate goal of full parity. Its reach has since broadened, with recent awards celebrating work across a range of dimensions of diversity in the field.
With the Pledge Award bringing renewed attention to the findings in the report on ethnic diversity, we take this opportunity to draw out some of the observations that give the data real nuance – not as a detailed summary of the report, but as a way of highlighting what the numbers alone do not fully convey.
The values-reality disconnect
The headline numbers above are stark. The disconnect is not news to anyone who works in this field, but having the data – from a large sample, across 76 nationalities – gives definition and scale to what has until now been largely anecdotal.
What the data in this report establish is not that ethnic diversity matters – few in the field would dispute that – but the size of the distance between principle and practice. A near-universal majority endorses diversity’s value, but a clear majority reports seeing tribunals that fall short of it. This is not a handful of dissenting voices: drawn from 305 respondents across 76 nationalities, the gap holds across a broad international sample. It is one thing to suspect a shared frustration; it is another to measure it. Quantifying the disconnect is the foundation for everything that follows. Since the report’s publication, the IBA Arbitration Committee has been hosting a series of roundtable dialogues, in cities around the world, on the issues it raises.
230 ethnicities, 76 nationalities
One of the more interesting findings emerged not from the survey questions themselves but from the demographic data – the background information collected from respondents at the end of the survey. In particular, when respondents were asked to self-identify their ethnicity, 230 different ethnicities were recorded (among the 240 respondents who completed the question). This is more than three times the number of different nationalities (76) captured in the same dataset. Moreover, within these figures, 34 respondents identified as mixed ethnicity, compared to just 19 with multiple nationalities.
This incidental finding matters because most arbitral institutions currently track diversity by nationality alone. Nationality is a useful and pragmatic proxy, but the data in the report suggest that it captures only a fraction of the ethnic diversity – or lack of it – that stakeholders actually experience. If the ultimate goal is broader and more meaningful representation, the lens through which this topic is viewed may need to be wider than the passport.
Another notable observation in relation to this ethnicity self-identification metric is that not all respondents engaged with the question in the same way. Sixty-five respondents chose not to provide their ethnicity at all – significantly more than the number who declined to provide their nationality, age or gender. One respondent said they had never thought about it. Two reported their ethnicity as “Human”, and one specified “Regional”. The data cannot explain the reasons behind these responses, but taken together the pattern illustrates the complexity involved in discussing ethnic identity with an international professional audience.
Lost in translation
The data added a different dimension when respondents described the consequences of tribunals lacking cultural awareness. Their concerns were not abstract.
One interview participant explained that in their culture, written correspondence with the opposing party follows particular conventions. For example, even in the heat of a dispute, letters open and close with expressions of goodwill. When their side’s correspondence was put before a tribunal unfamiliar with this practice, the friendly language was misread. As the participant put it: “In one arbitration, the other side disputed the fact that we were raising claims in our written correspondence. We had to explain to the tribunal that this apparently friendly language is something you always include in formal correspondence as a matter of course”.
Witness testimony raised similar issues. Non-verbal communication – eye contact, body language, tone – is interpreted very differently across cultures. In some Asian cultures, for instance, avoiding direct eye contact is a sign of respect. A tribunal unfamiliar with this may read it as evasiveness or dishonesty. One respondent put it bluntly: “If a witness from Asia is humble or timid, a tribunal composed of western arbitrators may think ‘that witness is lying’ or ‘they don’t look confident or assertive enough’ based on their body language”.
Other examples included the way apologies function across cultures. In certain contexts, for instance, an apology is not intended (and is not understood) to imply an admission of liability – but it might be interpreted that way by arbitrators applying legal standards rooted in a different cultural tradition.
Respondents also flagged behavioural or procedural differences that can easily be misconstrued – against the relevant party – by a tribunal with a different cultural sensibility. For example, ex parte communications with an arbitrator may be viewed as strictly off-limits by parties from some traditions but not others. The deference and protocol surrounding senior officials in Middle Eastern disputes may be seen as entirely ordinary in those cultures, but read as evasion or even bad faith by a tribunal applying a different set of cultural assumptions.
These are not peripheral concerns. They affect how tribunals assess credibility, interpret evidence and conduct proceedings.
Legitimate expectations
The data on legitimacy and fairness were clear in aggregate, but the open comments added a dimension that numbers alone cannot. One respondent described seeing a construction dispute in their region where the tribunal comprised three English law lawyers. For that respondent, the composition alone raised questions about whether the process could genuinely understand the local context. As they put it: “When I see a construction case, for example, where the arbitrators are three English lawyers but the project is in my region, that undermines legitimacy in my view”.
Another respondent stated that “diversity creates representation,” and that without it, parties from certain regions might be deterred from choosing arbitration as a dispute resolution mechanism altogether. In the context of investor-state arbitration specifically, one respondent noted that “the fact that arbitrators in ISDS are overwhelmingly European or North American is causing a lot of concern about the legitimacy of the system”.
On fairness, several respondents raised the issue of unconscious bias. One reported “a lot of unconscious bias towards African, Asian and Commonwealth of Independent States people”, including a tendency to distrust their witness evidence more readily. Another observed that “white tribunals have demonstrated prejudices and bias against Latin American parties and lawyers”. These reflect the lived experience of practitioners in the system, and the data suggest they’re not isolated views or incidents.
Opening submission
This report represents the first empirical baseline for a conversation that has so far largely proceeded without one. In that spirit, it raises more questions than it resolves. Should tribunals reflect the ethnic backgrounds of the parties, or aim for broader systemic diversity? Does the answer change depending on whether the dispute is commercial or investor-state? What role do closely connected factors such as legal tradition and language proficiency play, and how do we disentangle them from ethnicity itself?
The data don’t provide neat answers. What they do provide is evidence that the international arbitration community, by a large majority, considers ethnic diversity on tribunals to matter – for legitimacy, for fairness and for the quality of decision-making. That is worth knowing. The real-world examples exposed by the research suggest that the consequences of getting this wrong are concrete: a witness misjudged, a cultural cue missed.
The full report is available on the Cortex website, as well as on the IBA’s website, where it is accompanied by the IBA Arbitration Committee’s own commentary on the project.