The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) should enable citizens to travel, work and live anywhere in the EU safely and protected by the rule of law. This chapter discusses that claim by highlighting the interaction between free movement and non-discrimination rights of EU citizens on the one hand and specific AFSJ measures on immigration and criminal and civil matters on the other. It shows that the law has not evolved unidirectionally and that the interpretation of the objective of the AFSJ is unpredictable. At times, the law goes in the opposite direction to fostering free movement and is not in line with the fundamental nature of both EU citizenship and free movement rights.

The USSR was one of the first states to ratify the New York Convention on the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards.1 The Soviet organizations complied with the foreign arbitral awards by strictly following the rules of contract and procedural discipline appropriate to a centralized economy. With the demise of Soviet Union, the need for procedural means of the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards in the national procedural law arose. A 1988 Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet2 officially implemented provisions of the New York Convention into national law. In 1993, the Russian Federation adopted International Commercial Arbitration Law (hereinafter ICAL) based on the UNCITRAL Model Law of 1985.3 The ICAL granted competence to arbitration associations over disputes between companies with foreign participation and those disputes between such companies and Russian companies.4 The disputes between Russian companies were not subject to the New York Convention. This was addressed by the enactment of the 2002 Russian Federation Commercial Procedure Code (CPC) on arbitral tribunals, which established a legal framework for domestic arbitration that followed international rules on the recognition and enforcement of arbitral awards.5 With the adoption of the CPC, the Russian system of international and domestic arbitration was made comprehensive.6

The popular image of the American legal system is that it is run amok with litigation-happy disputants. Whether this is true from an empirical perspective is debatable, but in fact American federal law and policy favors arbitration as the country’s preferred means of dispute resolution. This is a longstanding position dating back to the enactment of the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act (FAA). However, the history of this Act and its implementation has been inconsistent. It was forgotten at one point as individual American states enacted statutes to limit the use of mandatory arbitration in consumer contracts. Eventually, the US Supreme Court recognized the FAA as prevailing law and voided state laws limiting the use of arbitration under the federal preemption doctrine.1 In more recent times, the US Supreme Court expanded the scope of private arbitration clauses to include statutory claims, such as in the areas of antitrust, collective bargaining, and civil rights. Even more recently, it has begun to limit the availability of arbitration by placing restrictions on class action arbitration.