Chapter 10 The Commonwealth Secretariat Arbitral Tribunal: The Evolution and Explanation of Changes to the Tribunal’s Statute Alice Lacourt* Abstract This chapter seeks to interrogate the rationale for the establishment of the Common- wealth Secretariat Arbitral Tribunal (csat) and examine how the Statute creating the Tribunal has evolved. Several applicants in the early cases before csat brought parallel litigation before the domestic courts of the United Kingdom. Arguments based on lo- cal law acted as a counterpoint to developments in the case law and Statute of csat. The resulting csat decisions delineated key principles on human rights and access to justice, which are still relevant today. csat—and the nature of the applications before it—continues to evolve, and this chapter concludes by identifying some lessons learned so far and what to expect going forward. 1 Introduction This chapter is divided into six sections. In this first section, the domestic law framework of the Commonwealth Secretariat is considered, together with identifying the present-day principle features of the Commonwealth Secre- tariat Arbitral Tribunal (csat), as well as the wider context. Sections 2 and 3 provide a brief history of the Commonwealth Secretariat and overview of its organizational structure and governance, respectively. Section 4 examines how employment-related disputes were initially resolved at the Common- wealth Secretariat and the factors that led up to and informed the establish- ment of csat. Section 5 then analyses how the early cases before the Tribunal in fact shaped csat, together with the evolving roles of the Board of Governors * Alice Lacourt, Legal Counsel, Commonwealth Secretariat,
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