Dr. Mohamed Hafez, Counsel and Legal Advisor to the Director of CRCICA represented CRCICA at the international conference on “Civil Proceedings Today: an International and Comparative Approach" held at Tunis, Tunisia on 2&3 May 2019. The Conference was organized by Tunis El Manar University, the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of Tunis, the Faculty of Law and Political Science of Aix Marseille University, the Legal Research Center of the University of Franche-Comté. The event was co-organized and supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation in the Maghreb, the Higher Institute of the Lawyers' Profession, and the National Commission for the Reform of the Code of Civil and Commercial Procedures.

Dr. Mohamed Hafez spoke at the fifth session on “The Civil Procedure and International Commercial Arbitration”. His presentation was titled “What is the general applicable law to the law of arbitration from the perspective of scholars and jurisprudence in Egypt and Tunisia?” The speech presented an overview on the origin of the arbitration legislations and its independence from the procedural law in Egypt and Tunisia. The speech also shed light on the scope of application of Article 25 of the Egyptian Arbitration Law and the barriers facing the arbitral tribunal in selecting the procedures it deems appropriate. Dr. Hafez also discussed the evolution of the jurisprudence to fill gaps of the arbitration legislations from a comparative Egyptian and Tunisian perspectives.

The other four sessions were respectively titled: “Towards the Fundamental Principles of Civil Procedure”, “Civil Procedure: Prerequisites, Mergers and Simplification”, “The Civil Procedure to the Digital Test” and “Civil Procedure and Amicable Methods of Dispute Resolution”. The Fifth Session was followed by a roundtable discussion on “Towards International Standards of Civil Procedure and a debate with the panel followed with a series of questions from the attendees to the speakers who were from Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, France, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia. The Conference was concluded by a collective workshop discussing possible recommendations for the modernization of civil procedure in the MENA and OHADA countries.