This article offers a descriptive account of interim relief under the Arbitration Rules of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce Arbitration Institute (SCC), with a primary focus on emergency arbitration. Building on practice notes published by the SCC, which summarise anonymised emergency arbitration decisions between 2010 and 2022, the article maps how the wide mandate of SCC emergency arbitrators to grant interim relief is applied in practice. It concludes that the familiar quartet of criteria for granting interim relief – a prima facie case, urgency, irreparable harm, and proportionality – are regularly considered to apply. The record confirms a consistent gatekeeping role of the criteria of urgency and irreparable harm: applications fail when harm appears adequately compensable by damages, or when imminence is weakly evidenced. The record also shows that applications that pass through the “eye of the needle” are often tightly tailored requests that preserve the status quo without prejudging the merits, and that emergency arbitrators generally apply a cautious approach to measures resembling specific performance.
David Sandberg (Fri,) studied this question.